


Modern Prometheus

by drinkbloodlikewine, whiskeyandspite



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Brutality, Canon-Typical Violence, Cruelty, Gaslighting, M/M, Madness, Manipulation, TW mental breakdown, Will kills Abigail, canon divergence season 1, dark!Will, encephalitis, flaying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-27
Updated: 2014-12-04
Packaged: 2018-02-27 00:59:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2672942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drinkbloodlikewine/pseuds/drinkbloodlikewine, https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskeyandspite/pseuds/whiskeyandspite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"Stay at the cabin so that I’m able to find you, unless someone arrives before me, and then go. Do you understand?” He shrugs into his coat and switches off the lights, pausing when there is no response. “Will -”</i>
</p>
<p>  <i>A hum, curiously melodic.</i></p>
<p>  <i>“What have you created?”</i></p>
<p>A take on the Frankenstein concept, of a master rejecting his creation, and the fallout of that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Myurra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Myurra/gifts).



> Commissioned by the amazing [mirroraurora](http://mirroraurora.tumblr.com/), with the request of the following: _A psychological 'Frankenstein' wherein Hannibal succeeds at bringing out the absolute worst in Will, and then regrets it. Set at the very end of season one, where Hannibal doesn't call Jack but convinces Will he killed Abigail and, like when he tied Abigail to him through Nicholas Boyle's death, he uses it to keep Will as far under his thumb as he can get him. It'd probably be a good time to finally get Will some treatment for his encephalitis, so now he thinks he owes Hannibal his life as well. Hannibal finds that what chiseling away at Will's psyche has done has made him a risk to Hannibal's life and freedom, so he tries to abandon Will or turn him away, but Will's having none of that._
> 
> We adjusted a few things, bb, but we think it still rolls with how you wanted it to go! We really hope you enjoy it!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The shuddering grows, the train atop them now as brutal shaking rocks Will’s body against the floor. Not a death rattle, Hannibal tells himself suddenly, no. A giving of life that was taken from him by cruel hands and a selfish heart._
> 
> _“You are not undone,” Hannibal tells him, breathless, as Will’s body goes slack with a moan. “You are_ alive _.”_

  
_**“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”**  
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein _

\---

At first, white noise. Like static on the radio, or heavy rain against glass. For a few moments, nothing more, and Hannibal considers cutting the call short, allowing himself the blissful few more hours to sleep his body craves. Then a sound, like a quick breath or a sigh played in reverse, and a syllable, cut off by the static.

Hannibal sits up, finds the static eases, if a little, and this time, hears the voice.

"- didn’t think this would happen so soon. Do you hear? Hannibal? The connection here is terrible. Hannibal?"

Will sounds breathless, like a man evading pursuit or tracking someone instead. Hannibal can hear his voice click on a swallow, another repetition of his name.

"I'm here, Will."

"Fuck." More static, something beneath, like footsteps on gravel or snow, just thicker than the bad reception. Pacing, in time with the quick breaths Will pants into the phone. Then the white noise seems to clear, if a little.

"I'm in the middle of nowhere here, I can barely see, but you won't believe -" Another swallow, a sigh. "- you should see it. You must."

"Where are you, Will?"

"Uh." Another series of steps, a wave of static before it ebbs. "Minnesota."

Hannibal lets the word hang between them, pressing a hand to his desk as if to find something secure amidst the crackle of sound, silence made audible.

“Hannibal -”

“You’re at the Hobbs’ cabin.”

Will’s laughter is like a sigh. “You’re an artist, Hannibal, you have to know. Have you ever been in a place, a time, a - a moment when - I don’t know, inspiration, _beauty_ just washes over you? It’s like - it’s like you’re drowning, and for those few seconds that the wave crashes against you, it’s all you can do to get your head above water and _create_ before it ebbs away again.”

“Who’s with you, Will?” Hannibal asks. His fingers maintain a steady, slow pulse, tapping against the desk. He knows the answer before Will tells him - had there been another investigation there, Hannibal would have been brought along, at least told by Jack -

“No one, now.”

Hannibal feels his teeth clench, not in anger but in tension, concentration. Not an answer he had wanted to hear, but more than that not the answer he had ever expected to hear. Not from Will.

"Are you hurt?" he asks at length, finds a long hissing breath as his reply.

"I can feel _everything_ , Hannibal. I can feel every pore of my skin, every pulse of blood, I can feel the tiny veins in my lungs and the cool air against them."

Hannibal imagines, Will without a coat in winter, walking through a forest, eyes up and lips peeled back in a grin. Dead of night, all alone, probably reaching for the snow just to remind himself what cold is, how it feels, what it means when his body starts shaking...

"I need you." The voice is barely heard but the tone is enough to have Hannibal straighten. "I need you here, Hannibal."

He snaps his wrist to tug back the cuff, studies his watch for a quick calculation of time and travel, before closing the ledger on his desk and moving to snare his coat.

“Who else knows you’re there? Who knows you were going?”

“I told you already,” Will sighs, a huff amidst the static that distorts his voice.

“No one,” repeats Hannibal.

“Are you coming?”

“Yes. Stay at the cabin so that I’m able to find you, unless someone arrives before me, and then go. Do you understand?” He shrugs into his coat and switches off the lights, pausing when there is no response. “Will -”

A hum, curiously melodic.

“What have you created?”

For a long moment, Hannibal says nothing, listens to the static, to the pacing, to the sound so suspiciously like a hummed waltz before the call cuts.

He wonders how hot Will’s mind steams, how many bridges within it have burned to the ground and what is left in the wreckage. Hannibal wonders, not for the first time, if he has let it burn too long.

_What have you created?_

\---

The road peels beneath the wheels of the rental, a hissing of gravel and the water just on its surface. Hannibal keeps one hand on the wheel, the other, gloved, against his lips. The GPS sits silent, no voice, merely a map for directions. The roads here are long, few and far between. In the dark, entirely indistinguishable from the forest around them.

Hannibal drives until the road ends, leaves and the first show of frost - or perhaps the last - blanketing the ground and crunching beneath the new tires as Hannibal comes to a stop by the cabin.

No longer yellow tape by the door. No longer bright lights wired to direct beams through the fog. Nothing, now, but a dark shape in the window of the second floor, the antler room. Curtains shifting, folding, closing. Hannibal kills the engine.

A dusting of white across the other car in the driveway is some thin relief - Will came, and did not leave again. As he passes it, Hannibal wonders again if perhaps he should call Jack, just to let him know where he is, what he’s doing. And as before, he decides against it, not knowing what exists inside.

Jack himself may be there, for all Hannibal knows with certainty, or for all that Will knows with certainty, really, worked now into a manic dementia. He will be hallucinating, certainly, more frequent seizures beyond even those that Hannibal himself has brought on, and only brushing - with increasing distance - against any verifiable perception of reality itself.

“Hannibal!”

There is no one near for miles and yet Hannibal turns his head, a stretch of his neck, vague irritation at the exclamation as Will slings the door open and stands braced against the frame. He is trembling, from cold or excitement or both, and his shirt is soaked through as Hannibal sets a hand against his arm.

“Will, come inside.”

A smile, wide, almost manic, pupils dilated and eyes bright with fever, but Will steps back, enough for Hannibal to follow him inside, for the door to close behind them. There is only one source of light within, besides the moon, a torch pointed high to the ceiling, light dispersing enough to see by, but dull, dark.

"It will be dawn soon," Will tells him, running a hand through his hair, and it stays flattened, wet with sweat. "Over the rise, there. Will illuminate the trees and set them on fire as we watch, immune. Will you come?"

Hannibal hums, has heard Will this way, disassociated, rarely. The fever must be eating him alive, so far gone as to require hospitalization, and yet Will grins, snags fingers in Hannibal’s jacket and holds him close.

"Come and see,” he murmurs, eyes hooded and head tilted, cheeks red with heat, wet with cold sweat. Will bites his lip, just once, and steps back towards the stairs.

Hannibal takes only a single step with him, before he catches Will’s wrists in his hands and brings him back, nearer, holding him firmly in place and close against himself.

“Will,” he asks again, “who did you tell? Who came with you? Who is here?”

A repetition, necessary, but one that yields no more by way of confirmation or revelation as Will laughs and presses himself against Hannibal’s chest.

“That would ruin _everything_ ,” Will says, twisting out of Hannibal’s grip and pushing both hands back through his hair, that stands wild with the gesture. “What was it you taught me?”

“A great many things,” Hannibal murmurs, watching him, “and yet perhaps not enough.”

“ _Mise en place_ ,” answers Will to himself. “Everything in its right place, everything in order. Hannibal, _come_.”

And so he does.

A slow ascension behind the shivering man at his fore. Hannibal touches the pocket of his coat, where the doses of acyclovir and corticosteroids rest, and watches as Will shudders, leaning back against the wall at the top of the stairs. He jerks his head as though struck, and Hannibal takes the stairs two at a time to reach him, and press a hand to his shoulder.

No seizure, this, but a shaking sigh, and eyes wide and dark that peer unfocused through the strands of lank hair that hang in Will’s face.

“Look, Hannibal. _See_.”

And so he does.

“Abigail.”

She rests as if waking, and in sleeping, stands. Held aloft by the countless thorns of buck and stag, blood blooms unwilting where she’s been pierced and now hangs unmoving. Her head bowed as if in shame, Hannibal knows her eyes will still be spread wide, lips parted and stained bright where blood still drips a steady, slow staccato to which Hannibal matches the beat of his own heart as if, somehow, it might become hers.

"Rivers and streams and struggles," Will whispers. "The things she told me, the things she did, Hannibal."

Will bites his lip again, tilts his head back so that he can only barely see the silhouette he has created, the tableau of murder and presentation. A presentation Hannibal had once given him, in the middle of a field, splayed and arched and shamed.

Field kabuki.

"She brought me here. A death in a place she had caused so much of it. Had tasted every strand and sinew." Will laughs, shivers, slides to sit on the floor at the top of the stairs, legs tangled and trembling, one hand up against his face. "I made it worthy, Hannibal."

"Of her?"

Will makes a plaintive sound, like a child in pain, like an animal in need of comfort, expression wide-eyed and _little_ when Hannibal looks at him.

"Of you," Will sighs. "Like an artist with a brush. All I could see were colors and colors, words swirling like flies around her as she begged, Hannibal, told me to honor her as you would and I _did_." He licks his lips, Hannibal feels his own press together tight, fingers twitching as though seeking to hold, to touch. "Everything you wanted, what you taught, all here. For you."

A hand rests against Will’s shoulder, but Hannibal does not yet turn his eyes from the girl. Mimics of mimics, Will copying Hannibal copying Hobbs, each reproduction a little further from the source, until this, without reason or cause.

“You have given her an appropriate death.”

It is the most he can say, truly, and the nearness of the words to a lie singes his tongue. A thousand other possibilities of who Will might have become, the strength and beauty in his thoughts and the body that could create works of art and horror the likes of which the world had never seen. A thousand other lives that could have - should be - taken instead of hers, so rife with potential. The pathways that Hannibal has burned into Will’s mind, inflamed to unrecognizability, and the man himself lost.

“Rest, Will,” Hannibal tells him, squeezing softly against Will’s shoulder. “Our work together is complete.”

Hannibal steps away from the man to come nearer Abigail, and notes with some faint relief the gloves on the floor, the lack of footprints or spray beyond where it would naturally fall. If their experiment is at an end, this the sad culmination of so much effort to shape Will into something beautiful, then at least the cleanup will be a simple one.

He does not reach for Abigail, though he feels the painful tug, the painful urge to see her face. Paternal. Responsible. As Will had been, pulled to pieces with the almost loss of her as she lay in hospital. Now Will sits cold, shaking against the wall, proud of his victim for being just that. Hannibal wonders how he will feel upon waking, the waves of his mind soothed to a gentle ebb and flow.

Hannibal wonders what she saw when she died.

The man who wished to teach her fishing, gift her lures and the kit to make them. Or the man who had once held a knife to her throat and sliced, loving her so much he could not let her live.

_See?_

”It’s not complete." 

Hannibal breathes, smells the fear on her, the panic, no forgiveness, no peace in her death as Will had claimed. It takes him a moment to turn back to the man against the wall, blue eyes up, lips parted red. Hannibal thinks, suddenly, of how soft they feel against his fingers, how they smile against the touch, always, surprised to be adored so.

"Our work together. It cannot be complete, we have not yet started it."

Surprised by the coherency, Hannibal regards Will over his shoulder for a moment more, and then turns away again. Unexpected for him to have heard, processed, understood, and responded, a series of synaptic connections that is unlikely, at best, when their joins are already so frayed.

“Haven’t you?” he asks, not unkindly.

Perhaps he’ll surface Nicholas Boyle now - the best lies are told in truth, and it was her blade that ended him, though it leaves questions unanswered. Perhaps he will let him rest, instead, then and leave the dead boy’s memory alive through the Bureau’s pursuit of a ghost - a brother who killed in vengeance for his sister.

It matters little now, nor the daydreams of what the three of them might have become together - a family, each seeing the other with understanding and clarity - but Will at least remains, and Hannibal returns slowly towards him.

Hand against his cheek, he traces his thumb across Will’s mouth, the beads of sweat gathered across his upper lip. “I hope that you remember as little of this as amounts to the thought you put into it,” Hannibal murmurs gently, closing his eyes as he brushes a kiss across Will’s brow, scalding beneath his lips. “Let the fever raze these memories from you as it has already taken so much.”

Will shudders on a sigh and leans closer, one hand fumbling to grope against Hannibal’s sleeve, knees drawing up in a childish sprawl.

"I don’t want to forget,” he says. "I don't need to. Not how it felt when her breath slowed, her voice wheezed down to nothing at all... don't make me, Hannibal, I need to remember." He blinks, a slow deliberate thing, head lolling, clasping Hannibal harder as the older man draws wet hair from Will’s forehead.

"Your fever needs to break,” he tells Will softly, watches Will’s eyes close, watches him sway into the hold again. "I need you to sleep. I cannot -" a smile, an adjustment "- we cannot work if you are exhausted."

Will frowns, shakes his head, moans softly as Hannibal grips his hair and tilts his head back. Then he smiles, softly, parts his lips. "Will you take me home?"

“We will be there in a matter of hours,” Hannibal assures him, allowing Will’s insistence to come and go unheeded. “Come.”

He tucks his hands beneath Will’s arms and brings him to his feet, careful to slip an arm beneath him should he need help down the stairs. Tension thrums through Will, tangible vibrations of interest, of energy, and Hannibal knows that the younger man leans against him less for want of support and more for want of nearness.

Hannibal manages him to the car before returning to check the house again, to leave no less evidence than expected, and - he hopes - none that implicates Will. Patient privilege only extends so far, Hannibal sighs, grinding his fingers against his eyes for a moment as he slides into the front seat.

“Whose is it, Will?” he asks, with a nod towards the car accruing frost with the deepening of night.

“Hers,” comes the immediate answer, replete with a wide grin. “You see?”

“I see,” Hannibal agrees. The girl coerced back here to the scene by someone seeking vengeance for her alleged part in her father’s crimes. Forced to drive her own car, left long at the airport after her transport to Maryland, back to the cabin. How the killer escaped is beyond Hannibal’s interest - let the bureau chase shadows in the woods.

And as the gravel kicks up beneath his car, hand braced against Will’s seat to watch behind him, Hannibal can’t help but smile.

"So many voices in my head," Will mumbles, "of so many killers. So many who got caught, and only I know why. I know how. And I will never get caught."

It is almost wistful, almost as though he cannot believe the words himself, but Hannibal cannot deny their truth. The things Will has seen, that he knows, that he has allowed to brew within him. The things Hannibal has induced to see them come to light, to hear and experience Will’s strength, his ability to understand and manipulate, twist and adjust.

To adapt.

Evolve.

Become something more. Something other. A thing Hannibal had wanted to wind and wind and wind up, to see how he would go.

"I will never get caught because I do not exist to catch," Will continues, voice slurring as fever takes him, as shaking contracts his body into a helpless curl against it. "A patchwork of words and blood and skin and no more. I am a _thing_ , Hannibal, I am an entity, I cannot die."

Eyes wild with fever turn to Hannibal, a smile almost helpless, warm, scared as a person is of their own mortality when it comes so close, when they so ardently deny it. " _We_ cannot die. We are eternal."

Hannibal does not argue with him, though the temptation forces him to press his tongue against the back of his teeth to silence it. It would do little good to try. Will speaks from madness and fever, only, Hannibal reminds himself, and were he not so compromised he would realize the foolishness - the danger inherent - in his actions and his words.

He remembers, for a moment, the thoughtful, shy man who girded himself with cynicism and sarcasm to keep his inner self safe. He remembers the gentleness that pervaded Will when he finally lowered those walls, an unfathomable kindness - a man who cares for stray dogs and who, with little more than a meeting, loved the girl that he just hung from a wall as though she were his blood.

“‘Pride goeth before destruction’,” Hannibal murmurs, instead, “‘and a haughty spirit before a fall’.”

Will laughs, the sound rattling past his lips before he presses his hand against them to quiet it, eyes dancing with amusement. “Speech smooth as butter, yet war is in his heart,” Will counters softly, though his voice cracks on the words and he shakes so badly that the words themselves tremble. “His words softer than oil, yet they are like drawn swords.”

A sharp breath is drawn and Hannibal turns to look at the man beside him for as long as he can before he is forced to turn back towards the road that winds towards the airport in the distance. He reaches into his breast pocket and produces the pills he’s been holding since this began, should the experiment go awry, as it has now, most certainly.

“Take these,” Hannibal tells him, pressing the folded paper that contains them into Will’s clammy palm.

“What are they?”

“If you are so clever as this, you must know that you are unwell,” Hannibal responds carefully, considering. “We cannot continue our work, Will, if you are not whole of mind.”

Will swallows, rests his head against the seat, watches Hannibal as the other regards him from the corner of his eye, does not push, just waits.

“You need to sleep, Will. Sleep until we get home and I can take the fever away.”

“It would be nice to feel my own skin again,” Will murmurs, fingers working against the paper, nails picking against it until he manages to tear a corner, slip the little pills into his hand. “To feel you against it.” Will presses his lips together, swallows, tilts his head back and presses the pills into his mouth. Then he stays there, still, eyes closed and pulse hammering against his sweaty neck.

Hannibal counts 103 beats per minute before Will speaks again.

“I dream, sometimes, that you draw your nails over me and peel me away.” The tone is slow, thickened by the sedatives, but Will does not seem inclined to collapse beneath them. “LIke old wallpaper, to find what’s beneath. But here you would find me new, reborn. Just the way you made me.”

Reaching slowly, uncertain of Will’s reaction speed yet, Hannibal takes the packet from him and pockets it again. His hand returns, a soft stroke through Will’s damp, cold hair. There he lets it stay, fingers curling against the man’s scalp to soothe him, to ease away by touch what the medicine will do in time. An antiviral, to begin trying to combat the source of the infection. An anti-inflammatory, to lessen the pressure where his brain presses against his skull, to ease the suffering of his beautiful mind.

And a sedative, to keep him gentled through the flight.

He is alert enough, Hannibal is relieved to see, to board the charter plane that he’s arranged for them. A short enough flight, and worth the expense to ensure that his name can be noted as something other than his own, removed from the security theatre of public airports. Will should sleep the duration of the flight, enough time to let the other medications begin their work and for Hannibal to return him to the house.

He should sleep.

He does not.

He is restless, but never a nuisance. Will talks, in hushed tones and frantic words that more and more make no sense at all. Narrating the images in his mind, reliving them for Hannibal to understand, because Hannibal has to understand. And Hannibal soothes him, a hand on his hair as Will arches into it, hands clinging harsh nails to the arm rest.

He listens to Hannibal’s voice, he forces his breathing to soothe and ease as Hannibal talks him into a soft meditation.

But he does not sleep.

The drive to the Baltimore house - he cannot leave Will in Wolf Trap in this state - is similarly filled with soft words and trembling, Will’s fever lower but his body shaking apart in its exhaustion. Hannibal hopes that at least biology takes over if drugs do not.

It is just at the garage door, the one leading to the house, that Will snares his hand in Hannibal’s lapels again, and presses their lips together in a clumsy joining.

“Are you pleased?” he whispers. “With me?”

Hannibal does not return the kiss, merely grasps Will’s hands in his own and backs the man stumbling into the house, pushing the door closed with his foot. He rubs his thumbs gently against Will’s palms but the looks he gives him is less kind, finally grasping Will’s chin to lift his head, ignoring the grin that parts his lips to instead study his eyes.

There is no lethargy in them, no weight of sleep or exhaustion, and he leans away, squeezing Will’s jaw with his fingers when the younger man leans forward to kiss him again.

“Will,” Hannibal breathes. “I will be pleased if you _sleep_ -”

“Hannibal,” laughs Will in response, twisting his head free of Hannibal’s grasp and stepping back on unsteady legs. “I don’t need to sleep. I don’t need to eat. I don’t need -”

Toeing off his shoes, and pushing them behind, Hannibal then shrugs from his coat and hangs it.

“I gave you a sedative, Will. A very strong one, hours ago. What did you do with it?”

“I don’t -” Will’s smile grows, his brows up, his expression entirely, almost childishly open. “I don’t _need_ sedatives. I’m perfectly calm. My head no longer throbs in time with the clocks you get me to draw.” He gestures with his fingers, like a release of a spark, bites his lip. “I feel clear.”

“Where is it, Will?”

“I set them away,” Will says, voice light, smile still in place. “Where the earth could take them to stop spinning so much.” A laugh, like the one over the phone, breathless and manic and Will holds up his hands not in defense but in a gesture of coaxing, pulling Hannibal close, beckoning. “I know what sedatives look like, how they smell. I’ve had enough in me to know how they feel. Like an iron bar against your chest, pressing and pressing and crushing you down, I don’t need them.”

He spreads his arms. “I’m right here, Hannibal, I am _alive_ , don’t you see?”

“And the others?” Hannibal asks, as quick fingers work his sleeves up to his elbows, one at a time. “Did you take them?”

“What others?”

Lips curling briefly over his teeth, Hannibal raises his hand to smooth the ire from his face, leaving it across his mouth as he lowers his eyes away from the wild and roiling blue that watches him.

“Acyclovir,” Hannibal murmurs, and though he keeps his tone steady he can’t help but feel as though it is a confession. “For the virus. And a corticosteroid, for the swelling.”

“Gone, gone, gone,” sighs Will. “A virus?”

“I can smell it on your skin as clearly as you could scent out the sedative.” Hannibal swallows roughly. “The cause of your fevers. Your seizures. The insomnia and the sleepwalking. This is not _you_ , Will,” Hannibal responds, stepping towards Will, close enough to touch his cheek and narrow his eyes at the heat of it. “Let me return you to yourself.”

“Why?” Will’s voice is so quiet Hannibal barely hears him, his eyes wide, up watching Hannibal, and bright with the sickness that is eating away at his mind, at that beautiful mind Hannibal coveted, nurtured, almost let burn out.

“This is what I am, Hannibal, this is what you made me, this is how I should be.” He shakes his head, brings both hands up to hold Hannibal’s palm against his cheek before pushing it away, not unkindly. “I can see everything,” he tells him again. “I can _feel_ everything. Hannibal, it’s like looking through a microscope on everything this world is, it’s like the pendulum never stops swinging.”

He frowns softly, considers. “This is what you made me, Hannibal. Are you not pleased?” He takes a step back, another. “Are you not proud of this? Of me? Look what I can _do_ now!”

Hannibal wonders if Will remembers Abigail now, what he’s done to her, that she hangs with blood coagulated black on the floor beneath her by his hands. He wonders if perhaps he did push too far, too hard, and that the empathy that he had built his weak walls to contain has now run free. Like a man in the wild who claims to have seen god, faith in his beliefs born of dire desperation.

He takes a step forward, another. Arms extending, Hannibal brings Will to his chest and presses his lips against the skin that sears so hot against his own.

“I have seen what you can do,” Hannibal tells him, turning Will to walk him backwards towards his study, a fierce hug held around the smaller man’s shoulders. “You are remarkable, in every way. But I wish for you, Will, in every way - not only as this. And not only because my unkindness has brought you to it.”

The door shuts behind them, as Hannibal loosens his arms just enough to push it closed. Another kiss, fingers held beneath Will’s chin to bring their mouths together, and he releases him to pass by towards the desk.

“Does it not exhaust you, to feel so aware of the world around you? Do you not miss the quiet, Will? Your home? Your dogs?”

Will swallows, shakes his head and ducks it to stare at the floor as Hannibal walks towards the desk, leaves Will to sway where he is, keep his own balance.

“It’s so quiet now,” he admits. “I’ve let it all in and the rush… the rush has ebbed, the humming stopped, I can breathe again.” He turns to Hannibal, tilts his head, moves to rest his hands against the desk, curling his fingers against it, almost like a caress, missing, already, Hannibal’s touch against him, the soft kisses, the cool skin he could melt against and savor.

“You will have me, in every way, Hannibal,” murmurs Will softly. “We are everything. We are chaos and the cosmos preceding it.” Will bites his lip, dizzy, exhausted, suddenly cold, needing the soft pulse of Hannibal against him, the reassurance that his breaths are filling him and not just emptying him. “Please come here.”

Hannibal watches Will, as much as he can when tugging open the drawer of his desk. Behind the file folders, atop the organizer, and beside the cheaper pens that don’t make it to his desk, he feels the hypodermic - wide, slick glass - beneath his fingers.

“One cannot have chaos without calm,” Hannibal ventures. “Nor violence without tenderness, or cruelty without kindness. Both halves must exist not only to form a whole, but to allow the other’s existence.”

He has kept the syringe, a strong sedative, alongside its kin - the same course of treatment as the pills that he hoped Will would take - in his desk since this began. Antivirals, anti-inflammatories, anti-convulsants. An emergency release should Will fall too far, too quickly in the grip of the disease. Hannibal had hoped in the weeks of relative peace prior to the phonecall hours before - and was it only that long ago, Hannibal wonders dourly - that there would be no need for such things, but here they stand.

He flicks the cap off the needle and brushes a finger against it to tap it free of bubbles, palming the hypodermic as he closes his desk drawer, and slowly returns to Will.

“I thought that I wished for all of you,” Hannibal intones, speaking with lips pressed to Will’s brow. “And yet now that I have it, I wish only for _you_.”

“You have me,” Will repeats, eyes closing, head tilting, just to feel the cool of Hannibal’s skin against his own, his breath smooth over the sweat in his hair. This is an intimacy, a gentleness earned and treasured by them both. Will feels Hannibal shift, just raise his arm, and steps closer, trusting, childish in it, seeking the contact, the touch, the comfort of an embrace that does not come.

The needle does not pierce skin, Will still, despite the fever, sharp and quick with his movements, relentless with an instinct that his honed as Hannibal’s is, beyond sickness, beyond, perhaps, even death. The needle does not pierce Will, but his cry breaks the silence into shards just as sharp.

“I did it for you!” Will hisses, stepping back until he feels the wall against his back, steps to the side to walk deeper into the room. “I did it because this is what you wanted, what you made me, what I _am_ now, Hannibal!”

A breath shudders through Will as the fever does and he brings his hands up against his head, staving off a headache, an episode, the betrayal coiling hot against his gut. “Don’t take that from me, you worked so hard to make me what I am!”

It’s enough of a pause that Hannibal can without effort close the meager distance between them. His body is unyielding as he uses it to hold Will to the wall, hesitating only as the younger man yelps in alarm. He eases, a little, just enough that Will tries to sling his elbow up, aiming for Hannibal’s face, but Hannibal snaps his head back and snares Will’s wrist, shoving it against the wall above his head.

“Everything must die, Will,” Hannibal responds softly. “You and I as well. What you feel is death now will simply allow you to live, in truth rather than in blindness.”

The side table and the lamp atop it crash to the floor as Hannibal jerks back away from the knee Will attempts to drive into his groin, electricity flickering wild from the bulb now broken. Shadowplays against the walls, silhouetted by flash-bulb bursts of sparks from the lamp, until Will tries again and Hannibal sweeps his feet out from beneath him, sending him hard against the floor. Hannibal drops atop him, hypodermic held precariously off to one side.

Even in his most frantic, Will has remained restrained, but desperation drives even the sanest people to panic, the smartest to incoherence. And Will, it drives to screaming.

“Don’t take this - don’t take it, Hannibal! If I lose this I will earn it again, I will be worthy again, do not do this - don't make me something inhuman!”

It’s agonizing, the wailing, the voice that rings so loud and sharp through the house and never past the windows. No one will hear, no one must. Not as Will arches and struggles, teeth gritted in a snarl as he begs, more and more with stranger promises and most painful things. Sacrifices of life and limb and organ and soul, everything, anything, just to stay like this, just like this -

“Burning, burning, burning -”

The strength in him is astounding, the last of his adrenaline pumping his boiling body with cool to allow him to struggle free, to run, flight and fight all at once.

For the first time, Hannibal feels pity for him, and a gnawing fear that comes once the needle finds the inside of Will’s elbow, a tiny curl of blood within the liquid in the glass before that, too, vanishes, and Will’s howls turn to sobs.

“You made me, you MADE me!” The struggle continues, the hypodermic slid across the floor to not shatter or be a weapon in desperate hands, as Hannibal catches Will’s and bends them above his head, presses their foreheads together as Will cries against him.

“You made me what I am, Hannibal, why would you undo me? Why would you undo me?”

Hannibal holds, fingers gentle against Will’s wrists despite the pressure there to hold him still, to hold him down. He can feel the heart beneath his own, fluttering and hammering in panic and the need to live, terrified and young, sick and so, so close to no longer beating if the fever takes it.

_What have I done?_

_What have I created?_

He has no answer for the man - the semblance of a man - writhing beneath him, but simply lets his weight settle heavy over him, eyes closing when a seizure starts to clatter through him like the vibrations of an oncoming train.

“Breathe, Will,” Hannibal tells him, through his teeth clenched as if it were his seizure to take, as if he could coax it into himself instead. A death rattle of an experiment gone wrong, the throes of a passing that jerk Will’s body hard enough up against Hannibal that he nearly unseats him where he lays.

The shuddering grows, the train atop them now as brutal shaking rocks Will’s body against the floor. Not a death rattle, Hannibal tells himself suddenly, no. A giving of life that was taken from him by cruel hands and a selfish heart.

“You are not undone,” Hannibal tells him, breathless, as Will’s body goes slack with a moan. “You are _alive_.”

He loosens his grip on Will’s arms, pushes himself back to sit so that he can drag Will into his lap, the paleness of his skin visible only in the sharp flashes of light from the bulb that lays still sparking against the floor. It’s as though he is so white as to be transparent, something other than human, and Hannibal holds Will - sedate now, and still - against him to remind him of warmth, rather than fire.

\---

The hospital is called, alerted to the intake of a new patient by the doctor in whose care he suffered. Stories woven and papers signed, to authorize a series of tests that will tell them what Hannibal already knows. Treatment follows, with protests when Will is alert enough to make them, silence when the sedation keeps him still instead. The fire is extinguished.

A letter is left at Will’s home, where the dogs have been tended to in his absence.

_Dear Will,_

_As you have survived the disease itself, so you have survived me. Whatever you feel from it, whether anger or hurt, understanding or curiosity, matters little and changes nothing._

_I will not call on you in such a way again. It is better for us both that those skills of yours, however wondrous it was to watch evolved, are left behind. Tend to your dogs. Teach your classes. Nothing more must come of this than what has already transpired, and what I created in you by force and fever can lay at rest alongside her._

_Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change. This too will pass._

_Regards,  
H.L._


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _"I would give you forewarning, doctor, but you've seen enough of this by now."_
> 
> _Hannibal draws a breath, as if in preparation, and ducks beneath the police line held for him. "I'm glad that you called."_

  
**_“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”_**  
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 

\---

Hannibal calls, as often as he should. To verify the treatments administered, to go on record as the original attending physician, to answer when there is a call from the office of the hospital, and not a number unknown to him.

Hannibal responds, but does not pursue. When he is told that his patient would like to speak with him, he declines, citing the capable hands of the doctors in Mr. Graham’s current attendance as far more capable of managing this situation than himself.

A former doctor checking in on a former patient, no more and no less, until gradually the calls stop.

Hannibal lives, peacefully as he can. He cooks for Jack and consoles him that Abigail was on record for her frequency of escape, and that he could have only done so much to prevent this, tragic though it is. He attends his patients. He visits the opera, once, and the symphony, twice.

Several times he wakes, reaching for a warm body beside him, but finds only cool sheets and soon settles back to sleep.

Piece by piece, the presence of Will Graham in his life is removed, by force of willpower in his mind and by a careful inventory and excavation of any traces that linger, of what occurred between them in treatment, in friendship, in more still than that.

And yet the man is unsurprised, several weeks after Will’s release, to find a note stuck to the front of his Bentley, and no other presence illuminated in the sulfurous lamplight of the parking lot behind his office.

Cheap stationery, thin paper. Enough that, had it rained, the words would have been lost. Hannibal considers it against the glass for a long moment before peeling it from beneath the wiper and pocketing it.

He does not read it until much later that evening, Schubert quiet over the speakers in the sitting room, wine filling the bottom third of his glass and dark as blood. The writing is familiar, with notes scribbled from Will left on the counter countless times in the mornings, first excusing his absence, then promising it that coming evening. For a while, Hannibal merely traces the lines making up his name, before he allows the words to seep into his mind, settle.

_Hannibal,_

_For so long you had the FBI’s most prized dog muzzled and tamed to your hand that they no longer trust it, they no longer ask. I am free to tend to my dogs, teach my classes. It is no matter to me, I see without seeing, I look without trying. When Jack does come to me, I will tell him what I always have, regarding the Ripper. He cannot be found, he will not be caught. He will not kill the same way again._

_Your ingenuity always was enviable, Hannibal, in all aspects of your life, I will continue to appreciate it._

_But never forget the harsh consequences of a poisoned soul. And never forget that even the tamest dog can bite when brought to do so. I do not wish you ill, I could not. A bond like ours does not break as a fever does, it continues to burn._

_But as you refuse my voice, you refuse my presence, I will not force either. I will seek to be invited, as once you so generously had, as a friend to your kitchen. Us damaged men are the most dangerous of creatures, Hannibal. We know we can survive. Walking through fire has made me fearless, and therefore powerful._

_Beware, Hannibal._

_W.G._

It is, perhaps, more melodramatic than the letter Hannibal might have written in Will’s place, but then, he has always envied the man his raw emotions. The wine goes down uneasy, a little heavier than it should. He sets the letter against his lap to let the words play through not in his own voice, but in Will’s, as clear in the chambers of his mind as if the man were there himself to speak them.

What he threatens is not exposure - to do so would be to expose himself in turn, a blade held comfortably now to each other’s throats. A curiouser thing than that. No, Will brings an accusation.

Condemnation.

Retribution, for the transformation that Hannibal allowed for him.

Will would not have been released were he not healthy. He would not have been released were the fever not extinguished, and the charred residues left behind it scrubbed free for new growth to flourish.

Hannibal feels his mouth twist unpleasantly downward, against his wishes, entirely aware that sometimes, when old growth has been removed by a wildfire, a new ecosystem takes its place.

\---

There are no more notes. No calls with breathing on the other end. Nothing tacky, and Hannibal supposes he would have thought little of Will had he assumed he would do something of the sort.

In a way, without his own calls to check in, he misses the presence, not only the warmth of the man in the mornings, when he would usually curl up, determined to remain asleep as Hannibal rose to prepare for the morning, but also the silences, the times when neither said a word at all but the space between them felt better for having the other in it.

The letter, Hannibal keeps, folded and locked in his desk. On late evenings he rereads it, allows for tonal change within Will’s words, to adjust the emphasis. Some nights, Will sounds angry. Others he sounds resigned, almost desperate. Affectionate and exhausted with receiving none in return. Some nights, Hannibal drinks scotch, not wine, and sometimes wakes with a headache.

It is raining when the call comes from Jack, direct to his cell phone, not his office line, requesting Hannibal’s assistance on a case.

“I can’t put Will out there again,” he confides, voice low, Hannibal can hear his own exhaustion mirrored back to him, within, and wonders why it strikes him that the cause for both of them is a slow process of death. “I trust you, Hannibal, to see this in a way none of my men can. I need your help.”

\---

"I would give you forewarning, doctor, but you've seen enough of this by now."

Hannibal draws a breath, as if in preparation, and ducks beneath the police line held for him. "I'm glad that you called."

"You say that now," Jack cautions, lips thinned and brows set heavy across his eyes as he stops atop the small hill that angles from the gravel-lined road into the woods. "I'll be making you dinner for helping out with this."

"I'm not entirely convinced that you need me, as much as you think you do," Hannibal responds, not unkindly. "I am many things, Jack, but I'm not Will Graham."

Something in Jack's eyes softens, and looks away from Hannibal to begin the sideways steps down the slope. "Neither is he, anymore."

A crust of leaves, brown and red and white with frost, crunch beneath their feet as they descend down the pathway checked for evidence and marked as safe passage to where the trees stab up from the earth to sever the sky in needlepoint peaks overhead. It is darker here than where the winter sun blazes clear and cold beyond the Virginia woods, shaded over as if clouds had gathered directly over their heads.

All obscured, wrapped in shadow, but for a clearing where the sun shines a spotlight against scarlet leaves so bright they are nearly aflame. Something glistens, there, atop the bed of frosted embers, and Hannibal stops, looking back towards the road.

"Guy walking his dogs," Jack answers, before Hannibal has to ask. "Called in to the tip line, hung up too fast for us to get more information than the location."

The words stick, like scotch, like wine too thick to swallow, and Hannibal accepts the gloves offered to him to slip absently onto his hands. "Do you think it was the murderer?"

"Too early to tell. We'll give the audio another listen but it sounded rough," Jack sighs, snapping his own latex gloves into place with a puff of powder that dusts across his sleeve. Hannibal studies the way it falls against the dense black wool, and nearly finishes the sentence for him. "Probably a pay phone. This far out, there's no cell service anyway."

"No," agrees Hannibal softly, before motioning for Jack to lead him into the scene.

Through the partition of trees that stand now as silent witness, they step carefully into the demarcated areas, Hannibal careful not to tread outside of it where officers comb the endless bed of leaves for traces that Hannibal knows already they will not find.

"Well?"

Hannibal lifts his attention from the leaves as Jack speaks, and lets his eyes settle.

It is as though the leaves themselves have risen from the earth, impossibly red, shining not with frost but with a wetness of their own making where the victim's skin has been flayed from him. The inside of it shines folded at his hips, pinks and the purples of vessels beneath, giving birth to muscle and sinew rendered in bronze and gold and red as if in tribute to the trees around it, vessels fat and livid as worms where their contents coagulate. The naked man is bowed, kneeling, across the stump of a tree long since felled, arms drawn back against his sides and similarly sheared of skin left hanging from the wrists. Balanced with his head over the edge of the stump, his jaw hangs slack, eyes flattened and unseeing.

It is as though Hannibal is seeing his own name, written in a familiar script.

"No articles of clothing anywhere to be found. No signs of a struggle."

"There would not be," Hannibal murmurs. "It wouldn't take more than a slight removal of the dermis - beginning with the arm, perhaps - to render someone unconscious and induce a state of shock."

Jack regards Hannibal at length, as much as to avoid looking at the victim as to study the man at his side, and Hannibal steps closer to the victim.

"His arms were broken," Jack continues. "We haven't moved him, but the medical examiner's preliminaries _in situ_ suggest dislocation."

The grotesque angles are obvious from so near, and Hannibal presses his tongue against the back of his teeth. He can feel the crunch of cartilage beneath his fingers, the almost wooden crack of bone being snapped from tendons.

" - running a missing person's scan right now - "

They will find his neck broken as well, Hannibal knows, if they have not already. The first gesture of the murder, perhaps, although the victim's head is stable rather than lolling - upright and resting on his chin - that a paralyzation is more likely than an instant death.

" - in the area saw anything, but we're trying to get this out of here quietly - "

And from front and back, his skin is taken in segments, not cut free from him but peeled back in stripes. Above his neck he is untouched, as well as below the waist, as though -

"As though he were trying to crawl from his own skin," Hannibal says softly.

The message could not be more clear.

"Do you see something, doctor?" asks Jack, and Hannibal shakes his head just gently, resting the side of his finger against his mouth.

He sees everything.

The serpent, shedding its skin in rebirth, emerging from itself anew. The flayed god of the Aztecs, who skinless symbolizes life and death in one, and a renewal always of one in turn with the other. The phoenix, sprung pale and weak from its own embers, the fiery floor of the woods in which Hannibal stands now and with the same pressure in his chest reads this message as he has read the written letter a thousand times already.

"Anything you can share would be appreciated," Jack adds, and Hannibal lifts his attention to study the man as if he had dropped from the sky. "It's not easy for me, so I can't imagine it's easy for you."

"Much more difficult," Hannibal agrees. He sifts past the thoughts that crackle at the forefront of his mind to tell Jack what he knows of flaying - that it was a punishment during the fourteenth century, often given after death, to deny the deceased entry to Heaven through the debasement of their corpse. That it was a torture of vengeance, rather than of information seeking. That this may have - for the personal nature and for the strength required to perform it - been the act of someone who knew the man, perhaps who knew of a justice yet to be administered. 

This last, Hannibal knows is true, though the rest is scattered to the winds. In even the deepest bolgias of his fever, Will had not hurt an innocent, and certainly now that he has fled that inferno for the higher grounds of purgatory, he would not begin to do so.

At least, not yet.

A risk Hannibal finds himself suddenly willing to take, though his pulse jogs a grace note faster than the beat before, and he loosens his tie just a fraction to allow it.

Not every love letter requires an answer, and often times the response is sent more clearly without one.

\---

It is difficult to pin the case down to the Ripper when no organs are missing, and the only connection to any of his other alleged victims is the brutality with which the kill was executed. Only some of the flaying had been done post-mortem, the rest, restrained perhaps by the shock of the pain, the man suffered while alive.

Hannibal considers the risks Will would have taken, the determination to send this exact message, no deviation, to have Hannibal receive it this way. A message of a rebirth, brutal and born of blood and fire both, a message that no one else would - or should - understand. Directed, aimed, fired precisely where Will knew it would be felt.

More and more nights, Hannibal spends awake with a snifter of scotch, more and more he stares into the fire and allows his mind to numb, to slip within itself to echoing rooms and warmer times. He does not bother the reflection of Will that lives inside his mind, but he enjoys spending time with it. The loneliness feels all the more profound when he returns to his sitting room, alone, and colder as the night had worn on and the fire had died down.

They manage to keep the murder from the news, only speculation on the smaller channels, article upon article in TattleCrime that go only on rumour, Freddie clever enough to spin the story to something sensational, but never substantial.

It is four days after the scene, the fire long burned out in its snowy alcove, that Hannibal’s phone hums with a message. Short, almost generic, if it weren’t filled, deeply, with a tone Hannibal knows so well.

The number is unfamiliar, a disposable cell phone.

_You did warn me, once, about getting blood on nylon pants._

"Out for a run?" Hannibal asks aloud, and the phone buzzes almost in response.

_Cheap material, wicks it up as if it were sweat. Burns up quick though._

As if Will were one of his dogs, whining for attention at higher and higher pitches. As if he were a child, tugging harder on Hannibal's coattails.

As if he were a lover, scorned, seeking continuation of what once was.

_Do you dream much, doctor?_

"Every night," Hannibal breathes. His fingers tighten around the phone as if he could quiet its vibration by force alone. Still it hums, beats in time with his pulse, as if their hearts were pressed together and lit, suddenly, as does the screen itself.

_I think of you often._

He presses the phone to his brow, sighing relief when it does not yet buzz, enough time to collect himself and steady his breath. Quick fingers turn off the alerts, the ringing, the vibration, to surround himself in silence but for the phone that glows with messages unanswered.

_Coffee has never quite tasted as good since you stopped making it here._

It's small things, always small things that build the foundation of a life, a friendship, a companionship. Little things that fall to insignificance until they no longer exist. Then they shine through like beacons, missed and ached for and delighted in the memory of, raised like idols.

A graveyard of them. Coffee and quiet sniffling in sleep and lazy morning smiles. Idols long ago erected, now only recently rediscovered.

_I still walk, you know. Into the fog around Wolf Trap. Always did feel safe watching the house float as though on an ocean._

Hannibal considers the significance, the small comforts Will had once told him of in therapy, later just in conversations together. Small comforts Will had never shared; Hannibal has never seen the house this way, wishes, almost, that he had.

_I shot a stag today._

He leaves the phone unlocked, cradled in his palm to watch the words unfurl, and envisions Will, face lit in the darkness, a smile caught in one corner of his mouth as his fingers work against the screen.

_He kept standing longer than I expected. I was sure the first shot was clean._

“The first struck,” Hannibal responds, tongue parting his lips, jaw working out a flicker of tension.

_Staggered him, though. He kept finding the ground beneath his hooves and tried to run but stumbled. I asked myself, do I take another shot?_

“You aren’t a hunter, Will,” breathes Hannibal.

_I did._

“You never have been.”

_He fell then, to his knees._

“You are only what I have made you.”

_His eyes were wild when I went to him. Trapped in the failing of his own body._

Hannibal shivers beneath a sensation like fingers against his neck, a trace of movement when Will would pass behind him, seeking him out.

_I laid my head against his side._

“To feel the life you took.”

_His heart sounded like yours._

Before he realizes he’s moved, Hannibal is on his feet, for no other reason than to remind himself that he can.

_I miss you._

Hannibal watches the cursor blink, metronomic, and times his heart to that. He imagines Will sighing, a long day curving his shoulders forward as he allows Hannibal to stroke his hair from his face, peel his glasses away and set them down, aside, away.

He should turn the screen dark. Set it away in a room he will not pass on his way to work the next morning. Leave it filling with empty words and emptier silences.

Hannibal runs his thumb against the message like a caress.

"I miss you, Will."

He thinks of every aspect of the man he can no longer have. The stubbornness remains, determination and endless cleverness Will had worked so hard to hide. But the gentleness, that's gone from him. The way he would tremble, remembering brutality, how he had cried, silent, angry, at being forced to relive one kill, another, countless cases and endless cruelties.

_I hope you're getting enough sleep._

The words come as though whispered in Hannibal’s ear, and he presses the phone to his lips, settling back against the couch, on the arm of it. It is not hard to imagine cool fingers in his hair, soothing him in the early hours, not with platitudes but merely words.

Small things.

_I can't seem to sleep without you here anymore._

His fingers itch. Ache. Desire to form words beneath them, to feel Will’s heart, to soothe the tension from his back and lull him into rest. Hannibal wonders at the harm of it, whether a response would be a consolation or an encouragement, the words themselves mattering far less than the act of answering itself.

He must not stagger, must not stumble now with the hunter so close at hand. He cannot let Will know that the first shot struck him so precisely.

“Sleep, Will,” Hannibal tells him, words spoken to an empty house, and he leaves the phone behind on the couch to pretend that sleep will find him any more easily.

\---

Hannibal feels the letter opener beneath his fingers before the sound of knocking fully settles against his senses. A glance to his schedule for the day confirms what he already knows - there are no patients for another two hours - and he quiets even his breath in anticipation. It is too forward, Hannibal tells himself, for Will to come calling so directly -

“Hannibal.”

He relaxes, releases the sharpened point of metal held in his hand, at the sound of Alana’s voice.

“A moment,” he responds, closing the ledger though the pages remain empty, undeserving of the half-formed thoughts that increasingly plague him, silent as the resounding quiet that has settled between himself and his creation.

Rising, he smooths his waistcoat and buttons his jacket on his way to open the door, through which Alana comes without hesitation.

“May I take your coat?”

“No,” she answers, before sighing and shrugging from it. “Yes. I need to speak with you. I tried to call but it went to voicemail.”

Hannibal makes no comment on the number of calls he has begun to deliberately miss. There had been only three more messages left after he had gone to bed that evening, none since, and when he had - in curiosity, not desperation - tried the number from a public payphone, it had said it was disconnected.

He takes Alana’s coat and hangs it up for her, offering - as always - a drink that she - unlike every other time - refuses. Hannibal watches her settle into the couch, knees together and hands clasped on top, fingers fidgeting together, over and over in a nervous tension that she is usually so good at hiding from others.

“Are you well?”

Alana looks up, keeps her eyes on Hannibal before allowing a small smile and a shake of her head.

“I’m fine.” Hannibal allows the words to cancel out her body language for the moment, settles in beside her. “I actually… I’m very worried about Will.”

He twines his fingers together, and rests his hands against his knees. “It seems to be a common condition at present,” he answers with a gentle smile. “A symptom of compassion, I’m afraid.” She returns the smile from habit, and it does nothing to release the tension from her eyes. Hannibal mirrors the concern, although it isn’t difficult to affect as he asks carefully, “Have you spoken to him recently?”

“Have you?” she responds, and Hannibal allows his surprise to register.

Hannibal spreads his hands over his knees. “I’m afraid not. Jack -”

“Why?”

Lips thinning at the interruption, Hannibal forces his expression to ease again, a practiced release of each muscle that he could feel tighten - however incrementally - in his features. “Will is no longer my patient. Is he yours?”

“He is my friend,” Alana replies, but there is a hesitation there, as though she is questioning her own claim. In a moment, it is gone, and her eyes return to Hannibal’s with a righteous sort of conviction. “And he is yours.”

A moment, two, before Hannibal looks away, feels his jaw tighten, release.

“Whatever friendship Will and I shared has been eclipsed by the happenings of the evening that got him hospitalized,” Hannibal explains carefully. “His mind burned, and I could not help him. He blames me for that.”

Scales upon scales, gentle coaxing to present a certain picture. Of blame and anger, ignorance of a disease that had eaten away the Will Graham everyone had known. Tragic, but unavoidable. A rebuild, now, from old ashes to new structures.

“He misses you,” Alana counters, tilting her head. “Hannibal, I don’t think he’s sleeping.”

Hannibal tugs gently on the sleeves of his coat to ease the sensation of his skin prickling, electricity in the air. A warning, an alertness erupting clear as klaxons. Will’s words in Alana’s voice, a message conveyed by proxy, as the phone before her, as the victim before that.

“A problem that has plagued him long before he was in my care,” he responds, each word carefully chosen. “Would that my presence were enough to ease his mind -”

“It wasn’t before,” interrupts Alana, a question and a statement all at once.

“No.”

“But you did try to ease his mind.”

“To the best of my ability.”

“With pills?”

A moment, another, of genuine surprise as Hannibal watches Alana’s brows draw together. An expression of dismay, disbelief, a hope, beneath, that this is all a misunderstanding pulled from a confused mind. And the terrifying knowledge beneath, that it cannot be that simple.

“It is not unheard of for medication to be the appropriate alternative choice for insomnia,” Hannibal replies.

“Did you sedate him?”

A bare twitch of the nerves beneath Hannibal’s eyes before he clears his expression, thinks back, briefly, to Will in the car, bending and twisting and not sleeping, on the plane the same, and in his office, this office, not hours later, claiming he had never taken the pills, that he never did take them.

Hannibal supposes it is rarely a custom at hospitals to check through pockets.

How many did he have…

“He had proven immune to the common pharmaceuticals -”

Alana does not stand, watching Hannibal’s feet rather than the man himself as he rises to circle in front of her, though she braces her hands against her knees as he had moments before. “So you must have written him a prescription. Explained when to take them, how many. Standard procedure.”

“A sample,” he answers, studying the hunch of her shoulders, the narrowness of her eyes. The expression of someone facing down a wave and awaiting its impact, unflinching. “To test its relative effectiveness against his tolerance.” A pause, and he adds, softly. “Standard.”

“And did you give that to him before, or after the others?”

Unseen, Hannibal’s shoulders snap tight, his pacing ceases. While standing unmoving, it is as though he has crouched, his body pulled to a fierce attention as the ground beneath him grows unsteadier still.

“Antivirals aren’t used for insomnia, Hannibal,” Alana murmurs. “Steroids aren’t used for insomnia. You knew he was sick.”

Hannibal can almost see it. The worry on Will’s face as he had sought Alana out at the FBI, _I know you’re busy, but this has been worrying me for a while…_ Of course she would go, concerned for her friend, for a man for whom she once had feelings but knew she could not invest in him. Of course she would listen.

He can imagine Will’s eyes wide behind his glasses, concerned. He can imagine the look easing to mild pleasure the more Alana investigated. He can imagine the way his lips would quirk, drawing barely together, suppressing a full smile though his eyes show nothing but amusement.

“I knew he was unwell,” Hannibal allows. “Showing flu-like symptoms that would not leave him for weeks, I gave him what I felt was best.”

“Glucocorticoids, Hannibal, anti-inflammatories. These are targeted medications, these are not things one can prescribe without having a diagnosis.” Alana looks betrayed, almost afraid to believe that what Will had told her was true, afraid to believe that this man, her mentor - someone she held in not only admiration but in awe - would do something so unethical.

_He told me to take them. Said they would help me sleep but they’re all different…_

“Why?” she asks. “If you knew early enough -”

“He has never been your patient.” Now Hannibal interjects, a necessary maneuver to work himself free from the corner that he feels pressing against his back. A step forward, closer to Alana, the tension enough now that she stands without entirely realizing why, but does not step back from him. She stands her ground, as he knew she would.

And so his voice softens, an apology laden in it that is effortless to create when in truth, his misjudgments are what has caused this disruption, and so many others. “Have you ever attempted to get Will into treatment?”

Alana presses her tongue between her lips and parts them to speak, but Hannibal continues, the same soothing tones he used before to ease Will back to sleep when unpleasantness would wake him. “Then you know how difficult it is for him. Jack fought tooth and nail for Will to see me, even simply for therapy, let alone for psychiatric treatment. I had hoped that by tempting Will with the promise of rest, we might avoid the hospital entirely, knowing - as it came to be - that he would not go willingly.”

A sigh, and nearly a smile, as Hannibal finally acquiesces. “As you’ve said,” he murmurs, “Will is my friend.”

A pause, a long moment between them, before Alana nods, just once, a sigh and then twice more, shallow and jerky, but enough to soothe Hannibal’s nerves to a gentle crackle against his ribs.

“I wish I had seen it sooner,” Hannibal adds, placating, scales upon scales. “I wish I had done more to prevent the fire in his mind that Will himself could not feel until it burned through him.”

“Diseases like that don’t make themselves known, physically, until it’s too late,” Alana adds, voice soft, and Hannibal allows relief to cool his lungs. An understanding, if fragile, if bare and shivering, but one regardless. Rebuilding a bridge on pretense is a delicate process, with a smart woman. “I think without your intervention it would have been worse for him.”

“We cannot know, now,” Hannibal allows, but her tone has slipped from agreement to one that mirrors his own, no longer appeasing but careful, feeling out as one would for a fracture or broken bones.

Hannibal considers, for a moment, the knife he had held so decisively before Alana had called on him. He wonders if it had been a moment of weakness, a desire for self-preservation against something - no longer someone - Hannibal can not predict or control. He had whispered, but what had grown within was something new entirely. He wonders if perhaps it had been, also, a test. Power for power.

He realizes that he is disappointed that Will had not come himself.

“Are you sure you will not stay for a drink?” he asks her softly.

Her smile in response is faint, and she shakes her head. “Raincheck,” she responds. A glance towards the door as she hesitates a moment more, the aftershocks of tension still catching in the way she forces a curl of hair behind her ear, and exhaustion in the curve of her shoulders. “Will you see him? I think it would help. You could explain to him directly.” She laughs softly, and shakes her head again. “The last place I want to be is between you two.”

A smart woman indeed, clever in her conscious choices and wise in her instincts. Hannibal rests a hand against her arm, no more than a gentle squeeze, before he steps aside to allow her passage to fetch her coat.

“I will,” he answers, increasingly certain that he’ll have no choice in the matter.

\---

Less than 24 hours, this time, before another message arrives. A different number, late enough into the night to know exactly who it’s from, if Hannibal had not already been expecting it, matching his sleeping patterns to Will’s almost involuntarily, unable to sleep until he knows the other has at least tried.

_Alana called._

Hannibal adjusts in bed, bringing the phone close to see, adjusting the settings to avoid it making any sound at all as Will starts another conversation.

_She seems so upset over a handful of pills. I’m glad I didn’t show her the whole bottle._

Far from the soothing touch that Will’s words could have provided, it is a jab, deliberate and cruel, as though fingers that once eased away aches and worry are digging against broken ribs, splintering bone and pulling Hannibal’s breath short. The vicissitude of Hannibal’s reaction surprises him, when he feels his lips curl back over his teeth. His fingers hover over the letters so near in temptation, but only just stills himself.

What would he say? That Will is a liar, a fact known by them both, or that there is no cause for this, a lie of which they’re equally aware? Perhaps that it is unfair to pull Alana into this and prey on her compassion, but what good would words be now when Will has already crossed that boundary?

_She’d have been very distressed to see the pentobarbital. Side effects include…_

Hannibal doesn’t have to read them. He knows, well enough, the confusion, aggression, hallucinations caused by the hypnotic that he never used on the man - more known for the openness to suggestion…

_She really wants to help me understand what happened._

He lays unmoving, held in place by words on a screen.

_Should I ask her about the lights? I wouldn’t want to upset her again._

Hannibal presses his fingers against his eyes, a breath, slow, as he remembers them himself. _Listen to the sound of my voice, you are in a safe place, Will, I need you to do something for me -_

There are no new messages when Hannibal sits up, swings his legs over the edge of the bed and grounds himself with the cold floor beneath his feet. He closes his eyes, imagines fingers against his shoulders, seeking over the tense muscle to splay over his chest instead, as Will’s presses hot against his back.

He does not admit how much it hurts him when he opens his eyes again to find himself alone.

_Should I tell her about how you held me? Pinned trembling and warm beneath you?_

The message sits but a moment before another comes in, quick succession.

_But that might upset her too._

Elbow against his knee, Hannibal rests his face in his hand, fingers spread across his mouth. In place of Will’s touch, in place of Will’s lips, a pale echo, cold distance where once there was warmth.

_Unconventional therapy._

Despite himself, despite the ugliness of the sound, Hannibal laughs behind his hand.

_I lay awake sometimes (all the time) and I think of your hands on me. Spreading me to press away our stress, our burdens. Lost in each other, sharing breath. Giving life to each other._

Heart speeding beneath bruised ribs, Hannibal swallows back a sigh to refuse giving his desperation sound in such a way. He lowers his hand from his mouth to rest against his thigh, no higher, though there is temptation in the thought of allowing himself that primal release, to take Will’s power from him, the draw of his words.

_Was all of that another treatment, too?_

The pang of regret that comes from that is unexpected, perhaps Hannibal had assumed it was unspoken, understood, that what they shared intimately was for its own sake, for both of their pleasure, because both had wanted it. Never a coercion, there, from either of them. With a sigh, he settles back into bed, sitting up against the headboard.

_I miss you, Hannibal._

“Will.” Soft words once spoken together, neither of them fully awake but both too contented with gentle murmurs to appear more conscious. Hannibal sets his phone against his knees, taps his finger against the edge as he waits. As no other message comes through and lights the screen again and it fades to a more manageable glow in the dark bedroom.

_I need you._

Words against Hannibal’s chest, his back, whimpered and breathed and laughed against him. Words that Hannibal had held close as he had held Will, sighed soft and warm to his skin. He swallows, fingers lifting to awaken the screen that had faded once more, pressing to the blank window to bring the cursor to life.

_I’m here, Will._

He waits. His own message strange amidst Will’s. The screen remains bright, then dims, then darkens. Hannibal swipes his finger across it to bring it back to life. Over and over. Until the sun crawls up over the horizon, slips through the blackout curtains to crawl across the bed.

No message.

When Hannibal gives in and calls the number, it says it has been disconnected. He cannot bring himself to delete the number from his phone.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Jack shakes his head a little, hand pressed across his mouth before he gestures wide. “Why Prometheus?”_
> 
> _“He considers himself unduly punished. Perhaps by what this man did to him,” Hannibal offers, a comfortable lie seeded amongst truths._
> 
> _"Or perhaps he seeks to punish his master for something," Will adjusts. "The man who made him, gave him something so powerful as fire, meant for the Gods alone but offered to him."_

  
**_“Listen to me, Frankenstein. You accuse me of murder; and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man!”_**  
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 

\---

“I must admit to being at a loss, Jack.”

“You’re in good company, then.”

Hannibal lowers his eyes again towards the table, a glimpse of shining metal beneath the mass of thick grey atop it. Though it was once wet, curved across with sloughing lines like topographic features, the clay has now hardened. Hannibal circles slowly to where wood protrudes, built into a low barricade against the mud that otherwise would have filled the opening that glistens wet and red, but there is no livid purple where Hannibal expects it to be, and he steps back from looking into the aperture to take in the whole. The halogens burning hot overhead reflect in matte orbs, white against the grey, to outline a shape that is, just vaguely, human.

In good company, indeed.

“We haven’t started flaking off the mud yet to get an ID, it was enough of an excavation just to pry him out,” Jack says, gloved hands braced against the channel that runs the length of the table, still dry. It will not be much longer, Hannibal supposes.

The corpse - though Hannibal supposes “mummy” to be a more accurate description - had been found earlier that morning by another hapless passer-by. And this, just as the first, just as elaborate, just as thought-out and just as directed.

Another love letter just for him.

“Do you think this was a message sent to us, as well as the man it was sent on?” Hannibal asks, though he knows the answer, though it is simply a matter of time before the bureau and Jack put the pieces together themselves.

“We can’t know until we get an ID,” Jack replies, shaking his head as he pushes himself to stand straighter. “But something this sadistic, this elaborate, it’s not a random victim - this one is guilty of something.”

“In the killer’s mind.”

Jack allows a wan smile.

“And the liver?” Hannibal asks, motioning distantly to the hole, left gaping in the victim’s side.

“Gone. We thought it might be related to the Ripper murders -”

“This isn’t the Ripper.”

Jack and Hannibal both go silent, the voice sending pinpricks of adrenaline down Hannibal’s spine as he looks towards its source.

“Will,” Jack exclaims. “I’m glad you could make it.”

Will smiles, or what in any other situation would be considered such, but if anything, it is not amusement that shows on his face but frightening pleasure.

"I was surprised by your call, seems you’d officially stored me away."

"You needed the time to recover," Jack replies, leveling a look on the younger man that suggested wariness but not understanding. And instinctual thing, like knowing something is in the dark without being able to see it. "I would have given you the month but it seems killers don't allow for vacation time."

"Inconsiderate." Will’s word clicks in his throat before he turns to Hannibal and his expression darkens to something far deeper than pleasure; there is a certain awe there, despite the anger. It radiates from him.

"This is not the Ripper," Will repeats, eyes returning to the body they stand around. "This is an ode to him."

He circles the table slowly, and as he passes near to Hannibal, the older man can feel the hair along his arms rise bristling, until Will stands across the remains from him again. Wolves, squaring off over a kill, and Hannibal wants none of it. Still, Jack watches, waits, for the synergy the two men once shared to set off like sparks, burning behind Hannibal’s eyes as he takes in Will far longer than the corpse Will has brought him in offering.

“Do you think they’re working together?” Jack suggests, and Will tilts his head.

“They could be.”

Hannibal shakes his head, knitting his brows as if in thought, though in truth he has already read this letter a dozen times over by now, its subtleties and undertones, its hidden secrets. It is less a matter now of translation, and more a matter of what he can yield in truth or in falsehood, and what each means for him.

“But they are not,” Hannibal finally says. “This one wishes to be. A fledgling killer, a charmingly clumsy artistry -”

“Interesting description,” Jack interjects, honed in with keen bloodhound senses in a way that tells Hannibal to tread carefully.

“The wood here,” Hannibal motions, to where the wound has been forcibly pried open, dammed up from the clay that surrounds the rest of the victim. “A find of happenstance. It is aged, you see, it’s likely the killer found it nearby and thought it might suffice.”

"A piece that does not belong," Will agrees. "A scene made up of elements that intersect but are not commonly found together. It is deliberate. From the clay to the missing liver." He smiles, thin, almost an allowance. "To the find of happenstance."

The tension between them is palpable, as it once had been in an entirely different way. Once, they had pressed close, lips prying open lips, hands seeking to spread and hold and touch.

"But what does it _mean_?" Jack's tone is sharper, an interruption, reminder, warning all. At the same time, as both turn to him, it is for a moment as though he is a dog barking at shadows, knowing something is wrong, a fear response masked as anger.

"A call for recognition, perhaps," Will offers, hands in his coat pockets as he lets his eyes skim the body before him. No pendulum swing, he can recite the process from memory. "A reminder of a slight. A warning."

“He is Prometheus.”

Both men regard Hannibal at his utterance.

“Formed from clay, given the fire of life by the Gods. They took it back from him, and he from they again, though it was his originally the Gods considered it a theft of what was rightfully theirs,” Hannibal says softly, gloved fingers following a line where the mud sloughed and dried, until he reaches the cavity left open.

For him.

“For his punishment,” Hannibal remarks. “His liver ripped out and eaten daily by an eagle, regrown again, and repeated.”

“An agony,” responds Will. “Day after day after day.”

“You will find ashes inside him.” Hannibal lifts his eyes to Jack, avoiding looking towards Will entirely. “If our killer is as clever as he thinks himself to be.”

Jack shakes his head a little, hand pressed across his mouth before he gestures wide. “Why Prometheus?”

“He considers himself unduly punished. Perhaps by what this man did to him,” Hannibal offers, a comfortable lie seeded amongst truths.

"Or perhaps he seeks to punish his master for something," Will adjusts. "The man who made him, gave him something so powerful as fire, meant for the Gods alone but offered to him."

Will does not look at Hannibal just as pointedly as he reaches forward, does not touch, does not contaminate the body further than he has by making it what it is, here, before them.

"A punishment from the student, not the Gods. The killer feels abandoned, replaced, by a man he had filled with expectation and laid his own beside. This was a trial by fire. A cleansing. Rebirth to something more."

"If this killer is unraveling in anger," Jack says, he does not finish. The implications are enough for them all to go silent. Will splays his fingers above the clay, curls his hand into a fist and takes it away.

"The liver will have been removed ante-mortem."

"So a sadist?"

“Akin to the last you brought me to see,” Hannibal answers - to Jack, to Will, both.

“There was another,” asks Will.

“A transformation,” Jack responds. Hannibal nods, and Jack continues. “Left in the woods, a man flayed from neck to waist. Chemical analysis showed there was adrenaline throughout the system, which means it happened while he was still alive. You think this is the same killer?”

“Without a doubt.” Hannibal’s eyes pass briefly over Will, meeting them in warning and finding nothing but a calm amusement there in response. “Both acts of vengeance. Of cruelty.”

“Spite,” Will adds.

“Who was he?” asks Hannibal, finally stepping away from the table to remove his gloves. “The man in the woods.”

“He had been brought in on charges of manslaughter, his wife found dead in their home. History of assault, domestic abuse, but nothing substantial enough to hold him.”

"Certainly enough for our killer, then," Will murmurs, finds Jack's angry eyes on him and weathering it much easier than he once would have.

"I do not need a vigilante," Jack says, voice ringing in the lab. Another puppy barking at cars, a man so loud and powerful entirely unaware of the killers before him. Will turns to Hannibal, a slow thing, almost sensual, almost familiar.

"You know only two outcomes are possible, here, Jack," Will tells him softly. "Either he kills until he finds his resolution with the object of his rage. A forgiveness." A small smile before Will returns his eyes to his supervisor. "Or he kills himself. Suicide by cop."

"Someone like this can not be reasoned with," Hannibal adds, and Will bites his lip in a gentle show of agreement, pleasure, amusement.

"What has this man created," Will wonders quietly, "to bring another so close to the line of madness and enlightenment."

“So this isn’t just a copycat,” sighs Jack. “You think he knows the Ripper, directly? An apprentice, a student.”

Hannibal stands at a distance now, hands folded together and all but motionless. It is an unusual sensation, to feel pursued, to feel hunted. Certainly the FBI itself never gave him this, not when he was at his peak, plunging rebar and knives into his victims, selecting carefully the organs of his preference. They fumbled, theorized, brushed against the truth but never comprehending the whole of it.

An entirely different feeling from the wall now against his back, cornered by the man who once laid at his back, arms and legs folded fondly around him, rather than pressing his hands against his throat.

“Someone who imagines he knows the Ripper,” Hannibal responds softly. “Who looked on those murders and endeavors now to become something as known, as feared. An attempt to prove himself, through clumsy symbolism that he hopes will prove tempting.” He lifts his eyes with a sigh, feels his teeth bare in defense from the place in which he has found himself, though his words never raise above a calm, measured tone. “Not a student, but an applicant.”

"This is a message," Will counters gently. "Not to the FBI but to him. This is not for fame or infamy. It's a reminder."

"But will he do it again?" Jack presses a finger to the table for emphasis, latex bunching where it bends. Will sighs, but it is far from the sigh of displeasure, of irritation and anger that Hannibal had almost voiced not moments before. There is a deep contentment there.

"Until he feels himself vindicated," Will replies. "Until he is seen."

Hannibal watches Will, the ease in his body so vastly different than the last time he saw him, convulsing roughly on the floor beneath him, ill-lit from the sparking lamplight and ghastly pale. He is healthier now, at least in body. He has been eating. From the brightness in his eyes, Hannibal wonders if he has in fact been sleeping, despite the late night texts that claim to the contrary and leave Hannibal exhausted each morning in return.

But there is little left of the warmth of life in his eyes - happiness, compassion, the gentleness that Hannibal once prized above all else in Will.

Prized so highly he sought to extinguish it.

To darken him, to bring him down into the clay and remake him in his own image.

An act of hubris, warned against in countless myths and stories, the cause of nemesis that now regards him with blue eyes falsely gentled and a distant smile that stings with accusation.

“How long has it been,” Hannibal asks, “since there has been a confirmed case of the Ripper?”

“Months and months,” answers Jack.

“Is there any reason to even think he’s still here?”

“He kills in sounders,” Will responds mildly. “Takes breaks between, before something moves his hand again.”

“We’ve managed to keep this from the press, and I don’t care to be a conduit for messages between murderers.” Jack pushes back from the table again, closing his hand into a fist and bringing it down softly against the metal surface. “The last thing I want is for the Ripper to decide he wants this - this apprentice, this _applicant_ and for both of them to start up.”

“Then he won’t stop,” says Will.

“Not unless we find him before the Ripper catches wind of this.”

“If the Ripper is still here,” Hannibal reminds Jack, softly. “If he has any mind for these antics. Others have tried to coax him out in these ways, few have succeeded.”

“Those that have, have struck his pride,” Will gently reminds him, eyes on Jack, though his words are clearly directed elsewhere. “If this killer keeps a similar direction,”

Another implication left unspoken, for both men to consider, as Will shakes his head as though to clear it, brings a hand to his pocket for his aspirin and takes two dry without a word. For a moment more, the only sound is the hum of the lamps above them, the light artificial and stark. Then Jack sighs.

“And you can tell me nothing else?” he coaxes. Will shrugs, exhaustion overtaking him as Hannibal had seen it do so many times before, stooping his shoulders and setting in a tremble that runs through his entirely. If he is affecting it, he has grown to be beyond the exemplary actor Hannibal had known before.

“Doctor Lecter has seen both scenes. Perhaps he can make a clearer connection. I’ve told you what I think. It’s a matter of pride, this killing, this ritual, for both the Ripper and his… applicant. And pride damages easily with people who think they cannot die.”

Will goes quiet, and removes his glasses - a signal that all he’s said is all he has to say on it, and Hannibal watches for a moment more as he affects a distant distress, eyes averted and hands stuffed into his pockets, and the threat lingers like the smell of red wine in the air between them.

For a moment, Hannibal does, in fact, feel a strange sort of pride, in having had hand in this creation, that with soft words and cruel hands seeks his destruction.

If he’s honest with himself, he wouldn’t wish for anything less.

Passing by as Jack holds the door for them both and the technicians return to begin peeling Will’s work from its clay casing, Hannibal looks to the smaller man beside him, and offers softly, “It’s good to see you, Will.”

“It’s good to be seen,” answers Will, before slowing his steps. “Jack, tell Bella I’m sorry if I startled her the other day.”

At this, it is Hannibal who stiffens, the slightest show of startling he will allow, and although he continues on his way without stopping to listen, he hears enough. Jack is unaware, entirely unaware of what Will is now, what threat he poses to him. And perhaps the more harsh realization that although Jack does not stand in Will’s way, he is still a connection, a link, for Hannibal.

He thinks of Alana, thinks of the betrayal in her eyes, how she has not called or seen him since, beyond in passing. He thinks of the cool displeasure within himself at the thought that he would be isolated from a colleague, a friend, at the very base of it, a beautiful woman.

Isolation. Elimination. A strategic attack on Hannibal himself without actively hurting the people around him.

Yet. 

Until that, too, is no longer enough for Will and blood will pour.

Behind him the small talk has become a murmur, of Will expressing his condolences for Bella’s deteriorating health, explaining that he himself was at the clinic for his final check-up regarding the encephalitis, that the doctors are hopeful but unsure.

The threat is clear, though, to the man nearing the elevator, straightening the lapels of his suit. The threat is there.

_Do not push me to take this to your doorstep._

Jack stops, a short distance away, and regards Will with puzzlement.

“Bella’s fine,” he insists, without reservation, and Will’s brows lift as if in surprise.

As if he didn’t expect that response.

As if he didn’t know that Jack would stop just within earshot of Hannibal, unintentionally, and that the doctor would be listening keenly.

“Oh,” Will responds, “I’m glad to hear that. Really, I know we’ve only met a few times but -”

“Why wouldn’t she be fine?” asks Jack, a sudden alarm plucked tight through the man’s shoulders, despite his insistence.

Will shakes his head, eyes still wide. “I’m sure it’s nothing then, Jack -”

“Did you talk to her? She didn’t mention an appointment -”

“I’m sure it’s just check-ups,” Will insists softly, shrugging off the alarm. “Making the rounds, you know -”

“Making the rounds _where_ , Will?” Jack’s voice pitches deep enough, loud enough that a technician who had entered into the hallway turns back around to wait it out. Jack holds Will by the arm now, a breach of avoidance that he is entirely aware of, and entirely willing to pursue.

The elevator blinks and makes a sound, doors hissing open for Hannibal to step through. Will waits, brows drawn just enough to show genuine concern, genuine upset. He waits long enough for Jack’s grip to grow painful, long enough for the elevator doors to start to close.

“I thought you knew that she was seeing Doctor Lecter,” Will says, enough for his words to carry before the doors close and Hannibal catches just one, brief, flicker of blue as Will directs his eyes to him, and then he’s sinking down to the parking lot level with his stomach where his lungs should be. Vertigo he never allows himself to feel, has for so long convinced himself he is incapable of feeling.

The only reason it takes so long for Hannibal’s phone to ring is that there is no service in the elevator. He doesn’t answer it through the first series, pacing towards his car, but on the second set he knows if he does not, Jack will come for him personally.

Ties severed as neatly as the hepatic vessels that held Will’s victim’s liver in place until he removed it in tribute. In accusation. In condemnation for Hannibal’s alleged disregard. Another form of taking a life, to rip apart the connections between Hannibal and those he holds dear to him.

Another form of taking a life, to leave Hannibal alone, entirely, with nothing but the glow of his phone to stave away the darkness.

“Jack,” Hannibal answers, mustering a note of surprise. “Was there something else?”

“Get back up here.”

“What’s the matter, Jack?”

Hannibal begins to lean against the wall, but stops himself, regarding it with mistrust as he stands in the parking structure.

“I want to talk to you,” insists Hannibal’s erstwhile boss, one-time friend, now - he doesn’t try to guess. “Will Graham just left -”

“Oh?” Hannibal keeps his tone steady, but in an instant his hackles are raised. Too many columns here, too many cars, blocking out his lines of sight and leaving him exposed where he stands. With long, quiet strides, he circles to the corner beside the elevator, and sets his back into it, leaning as if bored while his fingers find the knife that has not left his pocket since this began.

“I will not have this discussion on the phone, Hannibal. Take the elevator to my office.”

Hannibal pretends the words don’t ring like a naughty schoolchild being told off by the principal. It is not disrespect so much as disregard. For Hannibal’s own potential plans, for his own potential secrets. For a moment longer Hannibal stands as he is, before Jack hangs up first, without waiting for an answer or perhaps not needing one, knowing that the man will obey and take the elevator up.

The bonds of friendship and the devotion that comes with it.

Hannibal wonders how Will knew. He wonders how he managed to keep watching without Hannibal feeling him there, noticing. Perhaps he had awakened an animal within Will after all, wild and feral, yet entirely adept at hunting in silence, stalking its prey.

There are footsteps in the parking lot again, the elevator doors having poured light and a silhouette onto the stained concrete. Slow steps, almost aimless, and Hannibal again fingers the knife as he keeps the phone to his ear, semblance of an excuse to hide himself away here, to have the wall to his back where none can climb it.

The steps echo, impossible to place where their owner stands, and the dawning understanding of that is brutal. Hannibal feels old memories, buried and flattened and set away, flickering against the edge of his vision, pulling his heart to beat faster than it normally ever does, even in exertion.

Step after step after step. Echo echo echo. Hannibal feels his breath release in a slow steady stream against his chin as a woman walks past, face down to her cellphone, frowning as she tries to remember where she parked her car. She passes by. Hannibal hears no one else.

He is embarrassed by the sigh he releases and its length, the relief that floods him and sends his nerves jangling, fingers cold but braced ready to cut, to kill, to flee from the monster that stalks him in relentless pursuit.

Another minute, given to himself as he holds the elevator door open and regains his senses, before returning back from where he came.

Jack is not at the doors, as Hannibal might have expected, but worse still for being shut away in his office. His secretary motions Hannibal inward with a pitying look that he does not appreciate, and Hannibal has scarcely shut the door behind him when Jack’s voice fills the room.

“Sit down.”

“Have I done something -”

“Sit. Down.”

Hannibal’s jaw tightens, a flicker of annoyance at the scolding tone he receives but has not earned. In a meager act of defiance, he removes his jacket to hang it beside the door, smoothing down his waistcoat before finally seating himself across from Jack.

“When were you going to tell me, Hannibal?”

Clearing his throat, Hannibal folds his hands in his lap, unassuming. “Tell you what, Jack?”

“About my wife.” The words are clipped short, cut brutally, and Hannibal shakes the image of vessels snapping beneath a knife from his mind before he regards Jack steadily.

“It was never mine to tell.”

Jack looks liable to throw something. Perhaps break something. Hannibal considers the lengths that Will went to to make sure this betrayal hit the hardest, to make sure it struck Jack in a place he would not forget, and a person he would not forgive secrets from. Hannibal allows a pause and continues.

“She came to me for personal reasons that, at the time, did not concern you.”

“They all concern me, she is my wife, Hannibal.”

Another pause, a thinning of lips Hannibal cannot control as he keeps his eyes down to where his knees are settled just by the edge of the desk, just beneath it. WIth enough force, he could tip the desk, strike Jack in the chest, wind him. The knife is still close, he could still -

A cold takes him that Hannibal has not felt in years, memories perhaps still raw from the stalking in the parking lot that never happened, the thoughts, now, that he would never follow through on.

He has never in his life felt so manipulated, so helpless to the masterful control around him. He would applaud Will if he could find it in himself to be the better man. In this moment, this one moment, he is owned, entirely, by his creation.

“I am under oath, Jack, to not reveal the details of my patient’s appointments unless they prove to be a danger to themselves or others. Bella is not either. I felt no obligation to inform you of her visits to me until she did so on her own.”

“So she was seeing you as a patient then,” Jack confirms, a moment of clarity through the confusion that burns angry through him. “That’s what you’re telling me.”

“I can’t answer that question, Jack.”

It’s the wrong answer, but there is no right one, and not in the face of such overt betrayal. Hannibal holds his breath as Jack does, finally standing fast enough to nearly send his chair to the floor behind him. “You don’t think this is something a husband - a _friend_ \- should be told?”

“Legally? No,” Hannibal answers softly, unmoving where he sits, even as he feels a chill wind settle against him. A relentless gust that tears at his skin, as the lies spread, the hidden truths. A betrayal, for Jack, as Hannibal feels from Will, and as Will in turn feels from Hannibal.

Projection.

The silence fills the room as loudly as Jack’s voice had moments before, until finally he shakes his head, eyes unmoving from where Hannibal sits stock still and silent. “We were friends, Hannibal,” Jack finally says, and at this, Hannibal tilts his head.

“Were.”

“Were,” Jack reiterates, spitting the word. “Friends don’t keep things like this from each other, Hannibal. Friends don’t hide things, Hannibal.”

“And what would I then have been to Bella, if I had? Besides at risk of losing my license, at irreparably damaging my reputation -”

Jack’s laugh is cold, ugly. “Your _reputation_.”

“ - by breaching patient confidentiality? She is my patient, Jack, and -”

“And?”

“And my friend.”

Jack makes a sound close to a laugh, dry and flaking like old paint, brings both hands to his face to steeple them against his lips before finally shaking his head with a slow release of breath.

“Whatever sick meaning of that word you think you understand, Hannibal, it is not that. This is not that.” His rage has slipped to something colder, now, something far more potent and frightening, and Hannibal finds his heart beating faster, his skin sensing every whisper of air against it. A body ready to fight or flee, an instinct not even Hannibal, with all his titanic control, can soothe.

“There are times when people need to speak to another before they can speak to their loved ones,” Hannibal tries, a truth to apply to the anger thrown at him, echoing on the room around him. “Times when they must make the choice on their own to come to them.”

A swallow his only reply, and Hannibal considers it a victory that Jack has ceased yelling.

“I encouraged her to tell you, from the first appointment. But it was not my place, Jack, to make her tell you, as it was not my place to defy her trust and inform you of her visits.”

“So this is her fault,” Jack offers, but it’s a weak rebuff and Hannibal only just stops himself from leaning forward in his chair as if in pursuit. Instead, he merely unfolds his hands, braces them against the arms, opening his body language as if to broaden himself, as if he were insurmountable, when inside he feels anything but.

“It is no one’s fault,” responds Hannibal softly, and Jack’s expression softens just a little, brows drawing in heavy over his eyes as he shakes his head. His fingers clench the back of his chair before he pulls it out again, to slowly sit once more, eyes averted from Hannibal rather than focused on him, no longer open and honest as Jack always has been over countless dinners and drinks.

_We were friends._

“I suggest a gentler tone,” Hannibal murmurs, “when you speak to her about it. It is a hard enough thing to discuss, as we have discovered here, without the additional burden of heightened emotions.”

Jack bristles at the words, as Hannibal knew he would, but he does not lash out again, does not strike back. “And Graham.”

Spine straightening, Hannibal allows himself now to shift, to rest his elbows against his knees, hands folded together.

“Has he been going in for treatment again?” Jack asks. “No bullshit, Hannibal, no confidentiality with him. He came to you under our auspices. We pay his bill, he’s ours. Has Will Graham been seeing you again?”

A moment, here, to strike at Will as Will has struck at him. But Hannibal’s mind is not clear, not clear enough to manipulate and adjust words to dance on strings for him today.

“I have not seen him personally,” Hannibal starts, holds up a hand when he feels Jack about to interrupt. To his surprise, he is allowed to speak unhindered. “I have seen him at the clinic. Perhaps he has asked for his records to be transferred to another physician. I would not be privy to the name, has he chosen to do so, the records remain sealed.”

A long breath from Jack, senses now honed in on betrayal where he has never thought to look before. He considers the words for a long time before nodding, an acceptance for himself, an absolution for Hannibal, for the moment.

“He told me he’s seen Bella there several times.”

“Perhaps he has had several of his own appointments,” Hannibal suggests. “I have seen Bella three times in total. She makes them by the week, she does not have a standing appointment open.”

Another nod, slowly settling into this news that claws at Jack like a disease.

For a moment, hands folded in front of him, Jack allows the confusion - the disbelief, the dismay - to settle into him, weighing heavy on shoulders that however broad carry an enormous burden on them, added to now irreparably.

By Hannibal.

By proxy.

"Can you tell me what's wrong? Why she's been going?" he finally asks, watching Hannibal, knowing the answer to his question but pressed to ask it despite. Gently, Hannibal shakes his head, and Jack leans back in his chair, dragging his hands down his face before resting them behind his head. "Of course not. Why start being honest now?"

Hannibal draws a breath but stops himself from speaking, lips parted in silence as he watches Jack withdraw from him, a trusted friend once who now would not let either of those words be used to describe him in the context of Hannibal Lecter.

"No," Jack sighs. "I've got to ask her. On top of Prometheus in there and everything else."

He doesn't ask Hannibal, as once he might have, how he should talk to her, how best to approach the situation. It's a deliberate restraint, pulling himself away, and Hannibal can only begin to imagine how his hurt might pour out with her, how her secrets suddenly exposed will cut another artery short from Hannibal in turn.

"Perhaps," Hannibal finally ventures, "it is best if you allow her time to tell you herself, Jack."

With this, at least, some of the tension eases, Jack used to his wife holding that level of control over her independence throughout their married life and before it. For a moment more they sit, play at civility until Hannibal takes his leave and Jack doesn’t stop him.

Another smooth ride in the elevator, down. Hannibal watches the numbers carefully tick down above the door. Lower and lower as he supposes a descent to hell would be, laughably, smooth and quiet. All of it waiting behind the doors that slide, now, silently open to let Hannibal free within its depths.

There are fewer cars, perhaps a lesson had let out while Hannibal had been interrogated - and there is no other word for it. He can see his Bentley parked where he had left it, undamaged and unmarked. He feels eyes on him, like soft fingers walking up his spine, and knows immediately the eyes belong to the man who had once run his fingertips over his skin in the early pre-dawn mornings.

“Turn around, you’ll pull a muscle being so tense. I’m not armed.” Will’s voice is smooth, warm, familiar, and with an edge of cruelty to it Hannibal has never before heard.

Hannibal’s steps slow, but he does not stop, does not turn to regard the man.

“With a weapon, you mean.”

“What else would I be armed with?” Will answers, coy, and Hannibal stops by the driver’s side of his car as he follows the path of Will’s footsteps behind him. Keys in hand rather than his knife, he remains motionless and waits for the distance to be closed enough that he can turn and -

Will’s fingers brush against the small of his back, a touch that burns with its intensity, smoldering as Will passes by, skimming his fingers across the curves of it until he stands across from Hannibal.

“Tell me,” Hannibal intones, watching Will who all at once seems so familiar and so foreign, like a reflection, rippling unsteady, of the man he thought he knew. “Tell me why I should not tell Jack everything you’ve done.”

Will’s smile is genuine, eyes widening in that beautiful way they do when his brows draw up in pleasure, when his entire expression opens. As it once had in the kitchen, between soft kisses and making dinner. As it once had in the bedroom they shared, with soft words and softer sighs.

“By all means,” Will murmurs, voice kept low, just between them, not enough to echo in the empty space. “Tell him.”

There is such confidence there, such genuine belief that Hannibal feels himself stopped stark again. Will shifts enough that he is somehow closer, though he seems to have not moved at all. He folds his arms over his front in a loose bend and rests his head against the side of the Bentley.

“Tell him,” Will insists, “that you drove my mind to burn. That you stretched my endurance to the point of snapping, to see if it would. That you let me see you kill, that you fed me the product of it. That you let me kill, and covered the evidence against me up.” Will licks his lips. “Tell him that you know how it feels to push in so deep that my breath hitches, and yours just stops, for moments and moments on end.”

Hannibal studies him, so very near, and tells himself that the urge to reach out and touch him is not to feel Will turn his cheek against his palm - not to feel his lips brush against it, to draw the man in and bring their mouths together after so many sleepless nights apart.

He tells himself that it is to pull Will by his hair and open his throat, to allow his blood to spill over Hannibal’s fingers - to drag him to the roof and let him fall, to lock him into the Bentley and dispose of him out of sight.

Out of mind.

Hannibal wonders for a moment if Will’s blood, once hot with passion and then with fever, would now run cold if he loosed it from his throat.

“You have nothing, Will. No proof of any of the things you say.”

Will’s smile gentles, then, to something much softer, something so loving it pulls at Hannibal’s heart, twists against his throat and holds him still. When Will steps closer still, Hannibal almost flinches when cool knuckles run down his cheek, hates himself that he turns to the touch, relishes it, feels it draw shivers down his entire body, by proxy.

“Look at you,” Will whispers. “You would accuse me of murder, and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature.” A soft thumb draws over Hannibal’s lips and Will smiles to feel the shuddering exhale against it.

“I have Jack’s trust,” Will reminds him softly, words barely carried between them as the space is just so little, and Will is just so close. He removes his hand and steps back, allows a sigh to drop his shoulders, and with a blink his expression is back to the mask he had worn in the lab, the one he had worn since he had woken in the hospital alone. “An ace you can never boast again.”

Hannibal watches, the slow consumption of Will’s nature - and there is no doubt now, to his mind, that this is Will’s true self - back into the shell that so nearly resembles the kind, uncertain young man that has held Hannibal so entirely, even still.

He wonders if that Will is truly gone, an edifice to resemble a humanity long fled.

He closes his eyes for a moment, trusting Will not to harm him, knowing that he won’t, and ducks his head. “What do you want from me, Will?” asks the doctor.

“I want it to be us again, great minds against false hearts.”

He lets the words rest between them before pulling the aspirin from his pocket again and shaking out two pills and tossing them back. After a moment he laughs, releases that sentiment that had almost pulled him closer to Hannibal, almost set him nuzzling beneath his jaw for comfort for them both.

“I want you to understand what you have done,” Will tells him. “To look upon me and see what you have created and what you have abandoned. I want you to taste the blood I have spilled for you.”

Will parts his lips to say more but thinks better of it. Sighing and taking two steps back before turning on his heel and walking away, leaving Hannibal in his silent hell, alone and condemned.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Hannibal skims his finger along the side of shining silver and to the tip, a fond memory in this, too, although the juxtaposition now is enough to draw a faint smile from him. He works his thumb across it, allowing the point to pass through skin and draw up stark scarlet that slips down the blade. Turning it over, he folds the knife and allows his thumb to drip against the counter._
> 
> _“If this is what you wish for, Will,” Hannibal intones. “You will have it.”_

  
**_“I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. There is love in me the likes of which you've never seen. There is rage in me the likes of which should never escape. If I am not satisfied in the one, I will indulge the other.”_**  
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 

\---

It is always a siege that effectively destroys a city. The lack of food, the lack of support, the knowing, growing, impending terror of a death slowly coming, by the weapons held against the gates or the hunger that lives within them.

Hannibal sits in his office and regards his phone that has remained silent for three days.

Nothing from Alana, asking after her theses or inquiring about a visit. Nothing from Jack, requesting help on a case or time to spend drinking scotch together by the fire. Nothing from Will.

Nothing from Will.

It is a tar-thick loneliness, worse, even, than had these people been killed. At least in death the silence would be accountable, understandable, but now, here, it is a taunt, it is a reminder of the hunger within the gates as Will stands outside them.

His last appointment with Bella Crawford had gone coldly. Though she was not angry at Hannibal for telling Jack of their sessions, she was upset that he now knew, that he was there and supportive, stifling her with the love she knew was beating at the cage of her ribs to allow him inside again.

Hannibal considers his oath, considers the knowledge that if he is to see Bella again it will be for the last time, and by her choice alone. He wonders if Jack will listen or blame him if he warns him of her clear intent to die. He wonders if Jack will listen to blame him if he implies she is taking the steps herself.

The clock ticks over to seven-thirty and Hannibal shifts his eyes to the shifting second hand instead of the blank screen that rests precisely parallel to his notebook and pen. No answers here, either, in the metronome of time and Hannibal’s own hollow heartbeat. He should go home. No one is here for the appointment, a slot kept open in hopes of seeing Will again. Now he feels the knife in his pocket in hopes he doesn’t have to use it if Will walks through the door.

The misery is palpable, and Hannibal allows his mind to travel, to sink to a better memory, office shifting with every precise tick of the clock to the sitting room in his home instead, Will against him, pressed close, thighs on either side of Hannibal’s own as his hands seek to memorize Hannibal’s face again.

They rock together slowly, movements that seem mindless but are far from it. A careful coiling of hips to bring their bodies in time with their breath, shared past open mouths that do not kiss but simply touch. The cheap polyester-blend pants, well-worn, spread beneath Hannibal’s hands as he brings them up the backs of Will’s thighs, inching higher but not yet grasping, allowing Will the room he needs to find himself here against Hannibal.

Each piece of the memory bubbles up in turn. Touch, first, always first with Will, scent next when Hannibal tucks his nose against Will’s neck and grazes lips against his pulse. Dogs and yellow Dial soap, unscented shampoo but for the distant burn of chemicals that Hannibal can taste as much as smell. A cigarette, half-smoked and discarded, which says more than Will has managed since arriving at Hannibal’s home in a flurry of coat and bag dropped to the floor beside the door.

It had been a long day, for him to ask for a cigarette from one of the technicians, their own noses weakened long ago from the constant influx of caustic chemicals used in their work. Hannibal presses his palms to the small of Will’s back to feel him move, threadbare flannel worn thin and soft from too many years of use, and beneath it a surprising strength, each turn of Will’s body perfectly controlled, unlike the gasp that rustles Hannibal’s hair when he sucks softly just beneath his jaw.

“I’ve missed you,” Hannibal murmurs, aloud, between times and places, the sound of Will’s laughter no more than a tired sigh, scarcely heard above the quiet friction of their clothes together, but in the office it echoes, now, long enough that Hannibal must get up and gather his things to leave to dissipate it.

He thinks on his decision, on seeing Will to the hospital and the moment they had asked if he wanted to stay with him, told him he may be out for a few days but he would be happy to see Hannibal there. He thinks of how he had declined, leaving Will in someone else's capable hands. 

In one moment, Will was dead to him; blue eyes no longer bright, smile false, skin too rough. No longer the bendable, beautiful man but now a near-broken one, fighting and shaking only moments before to convince Hannibal that he would take anything for him, that he would suffer any pain.

The Bentley hums along the road, eating it up until there is no more left, and Hannibal kills the engine as the garage closes behind him.

Within, he knows immediately something is wrong, with the instincts of someone who habitually lives alone, who can feel instantly when someone has been in the space without his permission or request. His entire body tenses, one foot behind the other where he had frozen upon entry, fight or flight tugging his mind and body both, and Hannibal realizes he is tired. He is so tired.

And still he works his way through the house ahead of his steps, sloughing off his coat to hang beside the door, removing his shoes to scoot beneath. The basement is locked, manifold, the keys on him at all times. The refrigerator is not, however, and Hannibal’s lips thin in thought.

Will would not be so foolish as that. Not when both hold knives at each other’s throats in wait for the other to move first.

There is little else available for recrimination, a relief now that Hannibal’s body seems to move so slowly beneath its own weight that he has always taken such pains to maintain his life to such miniscule perfection. There is no need to hurry, frantic, to clear away evidence - no need to rush and make mistakes.

He sets his briefcase beside his shoes and on silent steps makes his way further in, pressing his tongue against his teeth to stop from simply calling out to Will to bring him out of the shadows, unwilling to hear the desperation that would manifest in his voice if he did. But he doesn’t feel the air move, with the presence of another, doesn’t prickle across his skin in anticipation for it. It is the traces of another, here and now gone, rather than the other itself.

Himself.

Footprints in the snow, long after the one who left them is gone.

The house is empty.

He had never given Will a key, never for any vindictive reason, simply because there had never been a need. When Will stayed over, Hannibal was there with him. Will’s work kept him later, or he would make his way to Hannibal's office and wait and they would leave together.

The thought of Will, here, alone, is less frightening to Hannibal than it is entirely agonizingly sad. A place they once enjoyed together now enjoyed alone. Deliberately so, without Hannibal's presence. Not an avoidance but a deliberate show of intent. Hannibal finds himself thinking more and more of how many times he had snared Will against him in all the rooms he passes, how Will would laugh, breathless, and press warm fingers to Hannibal's skin.

Nothing through the living room, in the sitting room. The kitchen remains untouched. And now Hannibal considers that perhaps he misses Will so much that he is imagining him where he should not be. A hunger in a siege, draining Hannibal slowly of everything.

It is in the bedroom that he finds something amiss, just a half-filled glass of water on the mostly-unused bedside table, nothing more. Yet it is enough, entirely, to draw a shaking exhale from Hannibal as he rests his shoulder against the door frame to regard it. Not mad, not yet.

He does not touch the glass, he will not. It sits as if in wait to wash down aspirin past lips that Hannibal knows all too well, and so it will remain. His hand extends, despite himself, to skim the bedcover beside it. For a moment, it still feels warm - uncertain whether it is so by way of his maddened imaginings or it truly is - and Hannibal resists the urge to seek out the familiar scent of Will against the sheets.

Hannibal has starved before, and the thought wrenches ugly inside of him. He has been under siege by far more numerous - more barbaric - monsters than Will Graham, and though - in the recesses of the rooms in his mind - a quiet voice begs him to remember what he lost then, Hannibal quiets it. Gently, carefully closing the door to that cold and barren room, far worse than the one he stands in now, to still her voice.

“Breathe,” Hannibal tells himself, in a language he hasn’t spoken in many years, and near laughs at the absurdity of it, the walls collapsing in on each other in his mind from something so simple as a glass left, unattended.

He will not starve again. He will not be trapped in his own home. No, Hannibal decides, drawing in a long breath as if perhaps to catch some trace of dogs or cheap soap on the air. There are far greater monsters than Will Graham.

And he is one of them.

\---

There had been days Hannibal has called Will at home, listening to the call ring through to voicemail, and never leaving a message. His voice is still there, tired, explaining that no, he cannot come to the phone, and no, he will not return the call but he will take the message into account.

Despite the pretense with disposable cellphones, the play at espionage, Will still must live in Wolf Trap. He must still have a home for his dogs, for himself. A place Jack can find him, Alana. And Hannibal.

The road leading to Will’s home is familiar, a strange tension pulling behind Hannibal's eyes like the beginning of a migraine that he ignores. Wolf Trap has always been much like a sacred fort, to Will. Impenetrable through the moat of dogs and isolation. Its own ship upon its own ocean.

Unlike Will, Hannibal had been granted keys, having fed the dogs in Will’s absence more than once. The beasts know him, his smell, his movements. A moat already breached, and dogs do not quickly forget kindness. Hannibal drives, now, as the wheels eat away at the gravel beneath them, and kills the lights at the end of the driveway. The house itself looks awake, within the endlessly mingling shadows of dogs upon dogs, but Hannibal cannot see Will inside.

Play by play.

The door shuts with a quiet click, left unlocked in a wariness that has found itself - after so many years - at the forefront of Hannibal’s thoughts again.

A strike for a strike.

The gravel crunches beneath his shoes, the grass soft enough from rain to silence the steps that bring Hannibal to the porch.

Blow for blow.

He will make Will feel as unsafe - as violated - in his own little ship on the sea as Hannibal was made to feel within his self-made fortress.

The dogs herald him with eager barks and ready whines as Hannibal works open the door, and as predicted, does not see or feel Will inside. The smell, though, the sensation of him is everywhere, enough that Hannibal lingers briefly in the doorway - his body wedged between the screen door and the dogs to keep them inside - to let the wave of residual nearness pass dizzying over him.

He lowers his hand to Maggie, the big rusty brown dog who has always preferred Hannibal more than the rest, and hums a soft greeting to her as she licks his fingers.

“It didn’t have to be like this,” Hannibal tells her, if only for the semblance of company, something to fill the space that Will otherwise might have, catching Hannibal back against the door with hungry kisses.

They rarely spent time together here, Hannibal insisting that he could not put up with the fur the dogs left everywhere, but in truth he had wanted to allow Will the freedom of going and returning, of coming, eventually, on his own. The time they did spend here was always gentle, always restful. Loud coffee machine in the mornings and weekends spent one atop the other with gentle fingers carding through their hair.

Hannibal shakes his head. 

The onslaught of memory doesn’t help him, not here. Not when the primary reason for his coming here is to disrupt the comfort and the gentleness, to make Will as wary, as cautious, as he has made Hannibal with the mere placing of a glass for him to find. 

A moment more he allows the dog’s gentle affections, before pushing past the swarm of them all, tails wagging and whines humming short, and closing both doors to the house. Within, they leave him be, happy with someone there, someone familiar, as they all meander towards the fireplace or upstairs or back to Will’s bed, depending on where they all were before Hannibal’s car pulled up in the drive.

There is little reason to move anything in Will’s home, he lives in a creative contained chaos that Hannibal had initially found entirely impossible to exist within. Shifting one thing to another place will not catch Will’s attention, it would merely draw him to set it back without much thought. He thinks, for one highly amusing moment, of tidying up. Disrupting Will’s chaos with neatness as Will had disrupted his order with displacement. He lets his hands skim the counter in the kitchen, the bookshelves filled to bursting and stacked unevenly with books ranging from fiction to manuscripts, some Hannibal’s own.

At the desk - moved, now, from the window to the other side of the room, leaving more room for the dogs to feed by the kitchen in the colder months - he finds nothing unusual, nothing suggesting a window to what goes on in Will’s mind. He cannot step into his shadow, into the anti-matter left behind when Will moves away. Hannibal has other gifts that Will did not inherit, despite the attempts, over and over, to ingrain them.

The bedroom remains almost unused with the bed instead in the living room, a curiosity to which Hannibal had - as with so many other oddities and inconveniences - become accustomed. Hannibal touches a hand to the closet door to slide it open - the rifle, the shotgun, both still in place beneath his shirts, and on these Hannibal lingers. He runs the fragile flannel, grown thin with age and use, between his fingers, and knows the deceptive softness of it belies its strength.

A shiver is allowed to pass through him.

There’s a saying for that, Hannibal recalls distantly - that to shiver suddenly is the feeling of someone walking over where one’s grave will be.

Ensured of his relative solitude, the dogs settling in heavy piles of fur and breath back into the comfortable clutter of the house, Hannibal indulges. The shirt is softer against his cheek than even his fingers, and he turns his nose against it to breathe him in, a nearness he has not felt since before the fever sweetened the air around Will into a cloying, suffocating thing.

The ache that rends his ribs apart is gratifyingly intense, enough to drive a sigh from him as though in hopes that the next breath will allow Will to fill him instead. And so he takes it.

It cuts short when there is a knock against the window.

Lips curled, Hannibal turns in an instant, blade in hand from where it rested an instant before in his pocket. The branch taps again in the rising winds from the storm incoming, and Hannibal swallows down the taste of aluminum spreading from his jaws across his tongue as adrenaline keeps his body held in a tight crouch for moments more.

Over and over the tapping continues, seeking entry into Will’s home as Hannibal has gained it. Over and over until Hannibal pushes himself to stand again, caresses the blade with his thumb before closing it, returning it to his pocket and running flat palms down his jacket.

Everything is the same as he remembers. The subtle messiness that is never dirty, the clutter that is never in the way. Another brush of his fingers against the flannel before Hannibal leaves the room to return to the kitchen again.

It seems entirely useless, now, coming here, when there is nothing that he can do to get Will to listen, to get him to stop. And yet, his shoulders are looser, the tension in his neck and spine has eased, as though Will had wrapped warm hands around him and rubbed over the skin until the muscles relaxed.

_You carry more tension that me, and I’ve been shot._

_I have been worse than._

_Are we comparing scars now? I wear few on my skin._

_And I will still find a way to ease them…_

Hannibal shakes his head with a sigh, runs his palm over his face in a gentle rub to push the memory away, knowing that after that what followed were soft kisses and whispered words, shared stories and Will’s hitched breaths as he was stroked, sucked, brought to sleepy, delighted release.

There is nothing here. Will’s murders are not acts begun in the home, far too intelligent to leave any trace of his planning. The list of uncharged murderers - and Hannibal is certain in Will’s certainty that they are all guilty - lives inside his head, unsinged by the flames that Hannibal stoked. The inspiration for them, Will’s taste for history and mythology, inborn from the man himself.

_I want you to understand what you have done._

Nor, despite the conspicuous absence of Prometheus’ liver, does Will consume his prey. Its use is in artistry, in conveyance - elevated, beyond the low station that Will assigned them in life for their deeds. Hannibal regards the dogs for a moment, in passing through the livingroom, fingers tracing across Will’s bed, and he wonders if perhaps they took the place of the eagle in punishing Will’s creation.

_To look upon me and see what you have created and what you have abandoned._

Hannibal withdraws his knife and sets it to the counter in consideration, a clear enough spot on the tile for him to wipe down with a dampened cloth. Maggie sits at his side, ears pricked towards where food may happen, and Hannibal regards her kindly for a moment before he takes up the knife and switches it open, thumb brushing against the side of the blade honed himself.

_I want you to taste the blood I have spilled for you._

And so he will. Exhaling, Hannibal skims his finger along the side of shining silver and to the tip, a fond memory in this, too, although the juxtaposition now is enough to draw a faint smile from him. He works his thumb across it, allowing the point to pass through skin and draw up stark scarlet that slips down the blade. Turning it over, he folds the knife and allows his thumb to drip against the counter.

“If this is what you wish for, Will,” Hannibal intones. “You will have it.”

\---

The sensation of surveillance persists for several days, and though Hannibal finds nothing new displaced in his home, he knows Will has been within it. Perhaps a sixth sense developed from desperately wanting to feel someone near, that any hint of him at all sets off a nearly physical reaction within the man.

Hannibal hopes, truly, that one day he catches Will there, walking slowly through the house, just touching things and not moving them, sipping wine and then cleaning the glass to set away again. He hopes he sees him so he can pin the man to the wall and press his apologies silent to Will’s lips, to his cheek and throat and lower. He would fall to his knees to see the man again, a much higher victory than he thinks the man anticipates.

It is beyond loneliness now, beyond the lack of support that is palpable only when it no longer exists, it is an ache, a physical symptom of withdrawal from someone Hannibal never anticipated missing so much.

He misses the man before the monster. He misses the monster to see if he can uncover beneath him the man.

He finds the notebook on his desk atop his regular schedule, placed just as neatly, almost not out of place except that this one Hannibal keeps in the last shelf of his patient files, among hundreds of others, dot coded and secure in the balcony running the three walls of his office. This book does not belong here. It takes Hannibal a brief moment to go through his personal catalog before he knows who the book belongs to, and against all better judgement, against all instinct and pride, the first number he dials is the one he has memorized for Will.

The cellphone rings through, he does not leave a message and tries again. Three times before Will takes the call.

“You have never been a sadist to anyone else but me.” Will sounds tired, but there is a smile in his words that Hannibal can almost taste. “It was never in your nature.”

Hannibal hopes his own bitter smile is just as transparent. “Then you do not know me as well as I had hoped you did.”

“Then you admit that you were cruel.”

“I admit only to doing what my nature, as you’ve described it, compelled me to do. As what you do now is in your nature, though it took a wildfire to release it.”

“Nurture, then, more than nature,” Will remarks almost absently, and in the moment of silence, Hannibal hears the rustle of leaves through the phone, the wind blowing against it. He imagines Will’s hair, tousled and wild, as it might have been when he played - laughed - with the dogs.

“There is more to your nature than only this, Will.”

The younger man hums, a dismissive sound that raises Hannibal’s hackles in irritation. “So is this another opportunity of happenstance? Compelled to act - or not, as you seem to prefer - simply to see what happens?”

“What I choose to do or not,” Hannibal answers, dulling the sharpness of his tone to a firm neutrality, “is no longer your concern, Will. What she chooses - or does not - has never been.”

“She is screaming for help in her silences,” Will replies, soft, and for a moment he is that man again, the one that cried after reliving the death of the nurse in Chilton’s hospital, the man who would wake to chilling nightmares in a cold sweat. For a moment he is the man who would brush kisses to Hannibal’s cheek before nuzzling it.

“And you are so close that you do not see it, Hannibal. You are so involved, more so, after Jack’s withdrawal, that you will not help her. You would sit in your silences to match hers and you would see her suffer to death.”

“Death will take her, Will, and it will take her at a time of her choosing it -”

“Have you really given up that part of yourself so quickly?” There is a laugh there, gentle, almost like a parent soothing a child in a fuss. “Never once did you hesitate with me. You would see me burn if it meant I was interesting and found you the same.” A pause, a sigh, and Hannibal imagines Will licking his lips before he continues, always a tell for truth, with Will. “And you were so close to me, then.”

“To who you were then,” Hannibal corrects, forcing himself to remove his hand from where it’s pressed, white-knuckled, against the edge of the desk. “Not all things are equal, Will, you know that as well as any. She has the beauty of choice, to decide when death will find her, to stave it off. I will not -”

“It’s an interesting time to take that stance.”

“And had I taken it sooner, you would be dead,” he snarls, regretting the tone as soon as it spits past his lips. Will’s laugh does little to ease the pounding inside Hannibal’s head, the pressure behind his eyes that forces him to work his fingers against them.

“You took that choice from me.”

Hannibal does not answer.

“You’ve taken away that choice many times,” Will continues. “And now a friend - much as you have any, at this point - wants your help -” His voice trails off, his sigh - pitying - merging with the sound of the wind. “How many months did Jack say it’s been? Since the last Ripper murder.”

Hannibal does not answer.

“I think it’s been four,” Will tells him softly. “I know you stopped for a while. For me. And I never asked for that choice from you, you made it on your own. Just like abandoning me, that was all you as well.”

“You were not yourself.”

“I was what you made me, Hannibal.” Will’s tone is sharp, surprisingly so, before a sigh settles it again. “I am what you tried to destroy, and you have never once looked at me like this. Do you even know what you made?”

Hannibal thinks of what he has taken, instead. He thinks of the soft words and gentle hands. He thinks of how deeply passionate Will got, towards the end, how desperately Hannibal missed him when he did not see him all day. He thinks of the conversations, of sleepless nights and walks through the forest. He thinks of the empathy that has broken, shards like a tea cup against the tile, and pulled into it everything so that its power no longer exists.

He does not realize he’s spoken aloud until Will hushes him, until Hannibal hears the screen door slap against the doorframe and the hissing of the wind goes away.

“You talk of things that you have lost in me,” Will tells him, words gentled now, but not patronizing, perhaps placating. “But Hannibal, there is love in me, now, the likes of which you've never seen. That you refuse to see.” Will’s tone changes, then, on a sigh, a coldness seeping into it that floods Hannibal’s bones as he continues. “And there is rage in me the likes of which should never escape. If I am not satisfied in the one, I will indulge the other.”

A pause, a slow breath as Hannibal hears the familiar sound of a pill bottle, the rattling within suggesting Will needs more, and he wonders how many he has already taken to get him here, to help him sleep, to keep him awake…

“It is out of love, what I want to do, Hannibal. Wanting to help comes from love, it does not come from rage. I will be your proxy, and take your guilt if that is what it takes.”

Hannibal swallows, hard enough that he has to only hope it was not as audible through the phone as through his own ears, motionless, standing still in a body he can hardly feel anymore for how Will’s words overwhelm him.

“I do not want you to do this,” he says, as curtly as he can, as simply. No room for misunderstanding or semantics, no room for lies or omissions. “I do not want you to go near her, Will, I do not want you to speak to her or harm her.”

“You doubt my intentions.”

“I doubt nothing of you anymore,” Hannibal implores. His words are a eulogy now, for the compassion that once spanned through Will with such intensity he could not control it - as it might, still, but born anew in a way that Hannibal directed, but never might have predicted. “I do not doubt your capability, I do not doubt even your artistry, Will. I do not doubt that you think you mean well, but I ask you -” Hannibal parts his lips with his tongue, and feels the chair beneath him as finally he sits. “I beg you. Leave Bella alone. Let her have her choices, as I have taken yours. Grant her that if you will force my hand. Tell me what you want in exchange, and you will have it.”

He draws a breath, and holds it.

“Anything, Will.”

A silence then, so still that for a moment Hannibal wonders if the call cut, wonders - terrified - if Will did not hear him. His mind spins, thinking of how to call Jack, what to tell him. How to tell Bella and get her safe.

“I did not think you capable of begging.” It’s so soft, no victory in the words, no gloating, just genuine surprise as though Hannibal had revealed a secret to Will that he has told no other. He thinks, again, of warm nights and early mornings and closes his eyes as his jaw works, as Will breathes softly on the other end.

“Please.”

Will’s breath is just as unsteady as Hannibal’s, and then he realizes it’s a laugh. “There it is,” Will says. “There’s the word I have never heard you say.”

Hannibal hears the shuffling of dogs against Will’s legs, the soft whines as they are sent away with a soft click of Will’s tongue.

“She will hate you for your mercy,” Will warns him, and Hannibal knows he’s right, he knows it as he had known that Bella would ask him to help, would be here when she told Hannibal there was nothing he could do. He knows and holds the phone closer, counts his quickened heart against the seconds it takes for Will to speak again.

“Let her have her choices,” he says at last. “Let her have her suffering and fear. She has the same capacity for it as I. For the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I will not harm her.”

Hannibal manages a breath, barely voiced but voiced enough, the weakest sound he has ever made, and he hears Will’s intake of breath as he registers it, memorizes it, tastes it against his skin. For a long moment they are quiet, and it is Will, once more, who interrupts the silence.

“Hannibal?”

“Yes.”

A pause, just a breath more. Hannibal’s hearing honed so that he can hear the scrape of teeth against Will’s lip before he releases it from between them.

“I want to resume my therapy.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“You know,” Will whispers, feels Hannibal hum against him before he opens his eyes again. “Sometimes entire forests are burned down just to allow new life beneath them. Rebirth, phoenix from the ashes. As we all are, really, in the end.”_
> 
> _“Reborn?” Hannibal asks, eyes down to Will’s lips as Will deliberately bites the lower, releases it._
> 
> _“Ashes,” he replies._

  
**_“I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”_**  
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 

\---

Hannibal keeps his appointments.

An act of defiance, perhaps, to not let this particular patient usurp priority of the others. An act of defense, for Hannibal to hold to the one thing still stable in his life. Hours and seats occupied, a steady stream of conditions and complaints. Something to do, when otherwise he would simply sit in silence and feel every second that slipped by so slowly in anticipation.

In truth, the patients do little to ease that, and more than once the man finds himself uncharacteristically requesting that a patient repeat themselves for him.

As his six o’clock explains the recurring issues that plague her, Hannibal listens obliging as if there is something new about this. Something interesting. Something beyond the fact that he knows she hasn’t been taking the medication prescribed to her, and has allowed herself to worsen.

A recurring theme, in which Hannibal feels newly disarmed to intercede.

He finds that his usual mask of empathy, cleverly adapted from Will himself, watching him, interacting with him, genuinely feeling his understanding when near enough, is cracking, that he cannot in good conscience tell her she is doing better. He tells her, only, that she should come next week and that he looks forward to hearing of her progress. 

He does not ask if she is taking her medication, and she does not lie to him with a smile.

Seven o’clock comes and goes and Hannibal finds himself pacing the office to the beat of the second-hand. He knows Will will not be late. He knows he will not be distant. This is not a session, not therapy, this will be beyond anything their conversations have been. It will be a test and a punishment both.

The sky is dark beyond the windows, one of the lights out on the street to not even cast shadows within. It feels hollow, here, empty. Hannibal pours them both a drink and takes his own without thinking of more than wanting to feel the burn against his throat. He refills it, sets them both aside.

At seven-thirty, comes the knock. Polite and gentle, just two to get Hannibal’s attention, to get his pacing to fall out of time with the clock as he makes his way to the door.

Beyond, Will stands with his back to Hannibal, head bowed and jacket over his arm. His hair curls just above his collar, clipped neatly into a style Will has long avoided, to keep attention sliding from him like water, looking scruffy as he had been. Forgettable to anyone who did not have eyes, though Will never took the compliment.

When he turns, it is with a smile, eyes soft, lips curved.

“Hannibal.”

His creation made flesh, born from fire and educated in his newfound abilities with long texts that filled the darkness with the light of cruel knowledge instead. And despite the revulsion that has curled Hannibal’s stomach, wrapped tightly throughout him and stole not only the confidence of others but his own, in himself, in his sanity, despite all of that - he is beautiful. Cruel.

A monster given life within the body of a man.

“Will,” Hannibal answers, and his name though softly spoken is like a cry in the wild. “I’m glad that you’ve made it.”

Will hangs his jacket, rather than casting it across the chaise, and turns his eyes up into the dark recesses of the sprawling office, alcoves filled with books and dim lights, with art and sculpture. His attention lingers a beat longer on the patient ledgers, before the circles towards his chair - fingers pressed against the soft fabric - that Hannibal knows, no matter how long unoccupied, has and will always be his.

“It has been some time,” intones Hannibal, “since our last appointment.”

“So formal.” Will’s brows draw before his expression clears, a tease, a game, so easy for him as it once was for them both. Will keeps his hands in his pockets for the moment, a casual posture, entirely unthreatening, but before him Hannibal almost cowers. Will’s lips twitch, down as though in a frown before returning to his soft smile.

“I have not acquired a taste for therapy, yet. But you did promise me anything.” He watches Hannibal a moment more before sitting, hands settling against the arms of the chair in casual recline, legs unfolded before him. “And our therapy so quickly became conversations in the past.”

Watching as Will settles in, motionless, Hannibal recalls instead the movements that would cover the span of his office, like a caged bird, from the heights of his bookshelves to his own desk. He knows that this thing - this creature - watching him sounds like Will. Looks like Will. And despite the presence of a thin cologne, smells like Will.

But he does not move like him, breathe like him - an unnatural facsimile of the life that once filled Will, overpowering.

“Then do you wish for therapy?” Hannibal asks softly. “Or do you wish for company?”

He steps nearer, and away again, wary of lingering too close and instead resting his fingers against the side of the glass, half-filled with bourbon.

“The doctor, Will, or a friend?”

“Are we friends?” Will asks, brows up in consideration, accepting the glass as it is passed to him, brushing against Hannibal’s warm fingers, those he remembers tracing the sinews under the smooth skin of his throat, those fingers that he knows the taste of so intimately.

“A comfort to know we both still have them, isn’t it?” Will’s eyes narrow and he takes a sip, drawing his lips back in a snarl of pleasure before relaxing his expression again and bringing one leg to rest over the other. “It would be good to have a conversation without social constraints. Without Jack around to intervene. Without metaphor stifling the words.”

Will swallows, lets his eyes slip to regard Hannibal’s desk. “It has been lonely,” he admits.

"Increasingly so," Hannibal agrees. He stands a moment more, turning to rest a hand against the back of his own chair, his back to Will as if in offering.

Temptation.

There is no sound, no movement from behind him, and so slowly Hannibal loosens the button on his coat and finally seats himself. The whiskey singes his lips as he sips it, pressed away by the tip of his tongue, as he once again lifts his eyes to Will.

"Have you slept?" ventures Hannibal, hand lingering against the glass - a makeshift weapon of good weight should the situation suddenly require it. "At your house. Or at mine. It hardly matters now that we have become so comfortable in each other's space."

Will smiles, soft, tilts his head to almost rest against his shoulder. “I was so tempted to sleep in your bed,” he tells him. “To have you find me and do what you would. I fear, though, that you would not choose to do me harm but quite the opposite.”

He finds Hannibal’s expression gentling, strangely, an anguish where he had expected to see indifference or anger.

“You haven’t slept there since I lay down and left you a shadow,” Will says, certain of the truth of it, and finding his answer in the slow blink that directs Hannibal’s eyes a hair to the left of holding contact with Will’s own. “I’m sorry,” he tells him.

“Are you?” Hannibal asks, raising his hand as Will tilts his head again as if to answer, to instead let the question linger between them. “Perhaps the better question is for what are you sorry.”

“Less than I probably should be,” admits Will, a faint smile catching in the corners of his eyes.

Hannibal smiles in return, a wan thing, watching as Will shifts his shoulders and settles further back into the chair across from him. So far, still, and at the same time not far enough. “I appreciate the honesty.”

The bourbon warms cloying over Hannibal’s tongue before he cradles the glass between his fingers, leaning forward with his elbows against his knees. “Your messages -”

“My murders,” Will corrects him, and Hannibal assures himself, comfortable in his own falsehoods, that the ache that spreads through his chest is just the warming of the whiskey into his blood.

“Murderers, themselves.”

“Or near enough. Unconvicted but -” Will’s smile breaks into a breath of laughter, ducking his head but lifting his eyes as he does, catching Hannibal in his absorption of it, savoring the way the muscles draw up beneath the older man’s eyes.

“Your apology does not extend to them.”

“No,” Will answers.

Hannibal’s brows lift and he leans back into his seat, exhaling. “Nor should it, I suppose. Instead, then, to those whose pain you created without their having done you any harm but to care for you.”

Will sits up, almost pleased by the comment, the chastisement within that is clearly meant for him. His lips purse and he unfolds his legs to sit with his elbows on his knees.

“I made Jack privy to the suffering his wife was doing alone,” he says quietly. “I opened his eyes to the hope of reaching out before she left him without a choice in the matter. And Alana.” Will’s smile gentles, though there is a pain there, just beneath his eyes, like a weight. “Alana always suspected something was wrong. I gave her the final push to step away from me. And a reason to be wary of you.”

Will taps his fingertips together in a steady soft rhythm before stilling his hands. “Out of love, Hannibal, not out of rage.”

“Fiendish.”

“Misery made me a fiend,” Will counters, eyes sharp on Hannibal’s, unblinking. “Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.” 

“What happiness could you seek so selfishly?” Hannibal asks him softly, watching the way Will’s expression melts to something softer, like a dog regarding its owner, like the look Will had given him when he had wept and Hannibal held him against his convulsions, when Will thought himself unmade.

“Even just one smile on your lips when we meet,” Will murmurs. “Occasioned by my killings for you or any other exertion of mine, I shall need no other happiness.” 

Hannibal’s jaw works, a steady tension that he doesn’t bother to hide. If Will wishes to know him, then he will allow him to see. The unhappiness, in the downturn of his lips, the paranoia that narrows Hannibal’s eyes and the dark sleepless circles of worry - of longing - gathered beneath them.

“You had it,” Hannibal tells him, his voice as soft as his body language is not. “You had that, Will - my happiness in being alongside you. My pride in the work you've done, my -”

“Your curiosity,” Will interjects, biting his lip in a smile when Hannibal’s mouth twists into a snarl. He smooths it quickly, unwilling to yield his anger to the man who cause it in him as readily as his warmth, and with a tilt of his head to release the tension snapped tight in his neck, Hannibal relaxes, and cools once more.

“Yes,” answers Hannibal, expression darkening. “And in that, I was insatiable.”

“Are.” Will says, watches Hannibal blink at him, shift to mirror the way Will sits. Two predators, truly, squaring off in their first genuine meeting - Will having shown his colors, Hannibal prepared to adjust his own.

“Am.”

Will tilts his head, sits back, watches as, slowly, Hannibal does the same.

“I do not seek to surpass my master,” Will tells him honestly, taking up the snifter again to take a small sip of the burning substance within. “There was never the interest in dethroning you. Never the idea of getting rid of you, Hannibal. I merely wanted you to notice what you had done. To see your creation.”

“Selfish,” Hannibal accuses again, and Will’s eyes narrow in genuine amusement.

“I never asked to be created. And if you would seek ownership over a soul, why would it seeking your approval be considered selfish?”

At this, Hannibal can’t help but laugh, only a breath of it behind the grin that parts his lips before he washes away his bitterness with another sip of bourbon.

“What is selfish,” he answers, “is to do so at the expense of others. It is selfish to cast aside friendships that are hardly yours at all, and take them away from others who genuinely have them. It is selfish, Will, to disrupt and to disturb the peace that others have found, with each other or themselves, because you refuse it to yourself.”

He grimaces against the burn of liquor and finally sets the glass aside.

“You were never so cruel, Will, before the fever, and never in my curiosities did I seek to make you so. It is a part of yourself, inborn, that you have dredged up to lay at my feet. I may have provided the catalyst for it, the spark of life that lit it aflame, but I extinguished it and it was you that chose to keep it burning, fueled by the worst parts of your nature.”

Before Will can speak, Hannibal lifts his hand, eyes narrowing in trace pleasure as Will remains silent. “The question now becomes, if you might indulge my _curiosity_ , whether or not that fire has consumed the whole of your beautiful mind, and left only bitter ashes in its place.”

Will regards him almost impassively, calm in light of the cruel accusations, in light of the blatant shift of blame. 

"One by one," he says softly, "you alienated me from everyone I held close as a friend." Will licks his lips, bites the bottom one. "Jack lost his faith in me, so he started to call on you. Alana pushed her feelings away from me. Too unstable for her. Made unstable by you. You turned Abigail into your first true monster, but she failed you. That teacup didn’t mend itself, did it?"

A swallow, soft. "You throw such accusations. Project such cruelties on me."

Will’s smile is suddenly entirely genuine, and he stands, moving to set his glass to the desk before drawing his fingers against the back of Hannibal’s chair.

"Do you miss it?" he asks softly. "My beautiful mind? I think that a part of you is honest, and you do. But another part of you misses the shell that encased it."

Will stops, fingers hovering over Hannibal’s shoulder, before he presses them there and in a smooth motion shifts to settle into a straddle against Hannibal’s thighs. It is an entirely natural movement, one shared between them so often, here, at home, together.

But before Hannibal can respond, Will's lips draw together, brows furrowing, and he makes a soft sound of displeasure. "Now this is unfair."

He slides his hand slowly down Hannibal’s middle, to his belt and lower still, slipping into his pocket to withdraw the knife there. "I dream of killing you with my bare hands. And yet you would carry something so impersonal for me." He flips the little blade open, keeping his eyes on the shape of It. "Rude, Hannibal." Blue eyes slip to meet Hannibal’s. "Shockingly rude."

The older man shifts his head, a bare movement that does not draw their eyes apart - not to the glint of metal just in the peripheral of Hannibal’s vision, not to the slender fingers that hold it with an effortless skill. He watches only Will, and as if in temptation, raises his chin.

“I’ve had no reason to think us personal,” he responds. “Indeed, we’ve not been for many months, and longer still before that, truly, when you were still unwell.”

Will raises a brow, settling heavy across Hannibal’s lap. “When I was -”

“When I allowed you to be,” Hannibal corrects softly. Will’s smile widens, and he rests his arms across Hannibal’s shoulders, knife still held against his palm.

There is relief, in this obedience, in the threat that the man presents to him even if he didn’t have the blade in hand. Whether Hannibal says the right things or not - soothes away his distress or worsens it - hardly matters now. Either he will die, or he will not.

Hannibal has never feared either.

Yet there, too, remains the promise that perhaps Will has not, in fact, come to destroy his maker, as he has contended for so long. And if Will means it, it means Will has not been lost to Hannibal, and can be freed from the ash and clay in which he has tried to make himself heartless.

Hannibal rests his hands against Will’s thighs, unmoving but for their placement, eyes softening with the satisfaction of feeling Will so near again after so long. He could sleep again, now, even if it meant a blade at his throat, and the thought winds its way through his limbs, loosening them until his shoulders, too, relax beneath Will’s arms.

“I have missed your mind,” Hannibal murmurs. “I have missed your body. I have missed your heart and I wish nothing more than to know it again.”

“Learn it,” Will says softly. “Take the time to see your creation and understand what you have changed, and what, within, remains the same.”

Hannibal sighs, not put upon but tired, genuinely, truly tired, and Will leans in close enough to rest their foreheads together in a closeness neither have shared for weeks, now, months. Hannibal closes his eyes first. Will doesn’t at all, watching the lashes fan soft over Hannibal’s sharp cheekbones, lighter than his hair, almost invisible in certain light. He is beautiful, he always has been.

“You know,” Will whispers, feels Hannibal hum against him before he opens his eyes again. “Sometimes entire forests are burned down just to allow new life beneath them. Rebirth, phoenix from the ashes. As we all are, really, in the end.”

“Reborn?” Hannibal asks, eyes down to Will’s lips as Will deliberately bites the lower, releases it.

“Ashes,” he replies.

“And yet we are still alive. There are those trees that survive the fires, the storms that besiege them.”

“Damaged.”

“But they thrive,” Hannibal responds softly. His hand moves slowly up the curve of Will’s leg, to rest instead against his face. Familiar curves and angles, but cooler than Hannibal recalls, from the last time he took such liberties as this when Will’s skin scalded hot beneath his touch. “Do you?”

“I survive,” answers Will, sighing against Hannibal’s palm as he turns his cheek against it, “by whatever means I have to.”

“Then why consign yourself to ash?” The question is not asked with rancor, too exhausted for spite now, resigned as Hannibal knows he must be to the creature - fascinating and dreadful - that sits astride him. “There is far more of it in the world than the life you brought to it, than the hope -”

“ - and you?” Will interjects. “Who sets the fires and uproots the trees entirely?”

Hannibal swallows roughly, and in doing so feels how very near the cold blade is to his skin. “I have not, in a very long time now.”

Will shifts, then, rolls his hips in a languid twist against Hannibal’s, bringing himself closer, arching his back in a beautiful bend as he keeps his head ducked to Hannibal's hand, turns his eyes to him. It is not quite a forgiveness, but a treat for good behavior.

The knife does not shift closer or farther from where it rests.

"Fires burn out," Will reminds him softly, "They do their damage and then they fade away. And the forest does not remember the fire that had once destroyed it. To the forest the fire does not matter."

Another swallow, and Hannibal tilts his head, close enough that were they back at a time when both were intimate, Will would kiss him. Here, Will just curls his bottom lip into his mouth as Hannibal asks, "Do I not matter to you?"

"You matter a great deal," Will counters gently. "You created this in me. This ability to be other than what I was. In doing so, you changed yourself."

"You think this could change me as I have you?"

Another roll of hips, enough to draw Hannibal’s hand tight against Will’s thigh as he grits his teeth against a pleasured breath.

"When is the last time you killed?" Will asks, in answer. "For pleasure? For a feast?"

Hannibal leans towards the younger man, lips curling in a silent snarl when Will shifts back enough to avoid his lips. He tilts his head aside, though, eyes cast skyward in the manner of a martyr, mouth unfurling on a sigh. Hannibal thinks of Saint Sebastian, suffering the arrows of faithlessness, and brings his lips to Will’s neck as if in penance.

“Since before you took ill,” Hannibal confesses, bringing his hands to Will’s narrow waist, to feel the spread of his ribs - _alive, he is alive_ \- on every breath. “I had little taste for it then, with you at the forefront of my thoughts. And even less interest in light of your pursuit and the victories of your own hunt. I have killed, by proxy. And your messages to me a vicarious pleasure.”

Will’s pleasure is tangible in the shiver that ripples through him, pushing his pulse faster beneath Hannibal’s mouth where it rests, and he brings a hand to Hannibal’s hair, curling his fingers against the back of his head.

“It’s not like you to go so long without,” Will murmurs.

“A defiance of my own nature,” admits Hannibal, “in resistance to one who claims to know it better than myself.”

“Maybe it’s gone from you.” Hannibal lifts his eyes to regard his sacrificed saint at the words, his creation that has become so much more than what Hannibal’s hands shaped him to be. “In rejecting it, your _Genius_ has fled, and found a new home in me.”

“Worthy of that mantle, are you?” asks Hannibal softly, and he brings his hand suddenly to Will’s throat, pressing his fingers there until the can feel the drumbeat of his pulse strike a faster cadence. “Will you take that from me, too, as you’ve taken my friends, my home, my life?”

Will’s eyes slip down to regard the man so close. He does not flinch from the hand against him, does not shift closer despite how warm and spread he is held.

"I will take everything,” he tells Hannibal simply, his smile entirely in his eyes, as Hannibal's so often are, his demeanor, his carriage and presentation, all Hannibal's once, now adapted and adjusted to fit to Will as he wants them.

He feels the coil of tension in Hannibal, the shiver so slight he would not have seen it, just felt it, pressed close as he is. The blade has not moved from Hannibal's neck, the point against skin but not parting it. A warning. Or perhaps just a reminder. Perhaps nothing at all but a knife to skin.

“Will you,” comes the simple response, as Hannibal measures his breath, steadies his pulse against the press of metal. A hard shove would remove Will from atop him, and if Hannibal dropped his hand an inch lower before doing so, the strike would connect with his trachea. Damage, enough to shorten his breath and distract him, or perhaps collapse it entirely if Hannibal has luck on his side. The blade would nick him, certainly, but the arc of Will’s body would - perhaps - miss the deeper lying vessels that would bleed out fastest.

He would then stand over the man, or what once was. Watch his body arch and bend, fingers spread against his throat. Hear the melody of his gasps - as once he heard them in pleasure - one final time before Will suffocated on his floor.

“An unfitting end,” Hannibal murmurs, as much in response to Will’s threat as Hannibal’s own imaginings. “One that I had hoped, by seeing you now, we might avoid.”

Will makes a considering sound and rubs against Hannibal again. "In taking everything I will become everything," Will reasons. And it is perhaps not even vanity as simple fact. He would become the man’s entire world were he to destroy the one he has now.

And he’s come so close already to doing just that.

"You did not want to surpass your master," Hannibal muses, and Will grins.

"Just mimic him,” he agrees, leaning closer still to whisper against Hannibal's ear, one hand still curled around with the knife, the other slinking between their bodies to rub between his own legs.

"I remember some mornings I would wake to you touching me,” he gasps, smiles, splaying his fingers over his cock. The blade draws a warning line running parallel to an artery at Hannibal's neck when the man makes to touch Will himself. "Mm, just like this. Do you remember? "

“I remember,” Hannibal answers on a sigh, resting a hand against Will’s hips to feel him move, when he is disallowed to touch him as he has ached to do for so long. “I remember you stirring, soft sounds of sleepy displeasure at being woken. How quickly their tones shifted, grew higher, as you stirred in turn between your legs. The way you kissed me -”

A sound from Will, almost sweet, forces the younger man to bite his lip again as he palms himself harder.

“ - unsteady,” continues Hannibal softly. “Across my mouth, my neck, anywhere that skin was bared to you. Your hair in your eyes, obscuring them but not concealing their blueness from my sight, and a flush upon your cheeks. All the beauty of humanity,” he swallows. “And none of its cruelty.”

Hannibal loosens his fingers from Will’s throat, letting them trail lower, gently, down his arm to adjust where Will holds the knife. The younger man’s eyes narrow, but Hannibal hardly tightens his grip, only aligning it against his collarbone, against the shirt he wears.

“And I remember that I showed you better means to cut than this,” he answers, almost amused, if it weren’t for the weariness that weighs him so heavily. “Here, Will - forced forward you would sever not only the surface vessels, but cut directly through the carotid and jugular both.”

"You always did make an art of dismantling bodies," Will agrees, twisting into his own hand as Hannibal is forced to watch - still not allowed to touch. “There was little you did not make an art of in your life.” Another turn of his wrist and Will shudders, back rigid in pleasure, though still hard, holding back so he can watch Hannibal through hooded eyes as the other watches him.

“I thought I was angry at you,” Will murmurs, soft, keeping the knife where Hannibal had placed it, though pressing no harder. “For what you did. What you didn’t tell me and how you fixed me by force, when I begged you to stop.”

“Are you not?” Hannibal asks him gently, hands slipping higher from Will’s waist to just below his ribs, pulling him closer as Will bends and lets him, allows the reverent kiss in the center of his chest, over a little to his heart.

“I’m sad,” Will admits, slightly breathless. “That I had failed, that you had given me up rather than put me back together, if the first time did not work. I had to show you, I -” he swallows, parts his lips on a long sigh. “I have shown you. What you made and what you did. And what it means to be extinguished.”

Hannibal tilts his head upward, as though to smother the sigh from Will’s lips beneath his own, and finds only another laugh breathless against his lips, a cluck of Will’s tongue in disapproval as he tilts away and presses the knife a little more firmly in warning. Now, finally, Hannibal snarls, allows the nearly feral growl that has been building in him to pass gritted teeth and curled lips.

“You chastise me for lighting the fire, and again for extinguishing it. You torment me for having given you life and then, more, for allowing you to live it. Should I have kept you ill? Let the fever take you entirely and leave behind the ashes from which you would have never emerged? You are no phoenix, Will,” he whispers, his voice as harsh as the words themselves.

With a sudden surge Hannibal uproots him, only gently enough that the blade does not dig in where it is held, falling forward to his knees with Will beneath him. Across the floor, animals both, teeth at each other’s throats and the promise of blood in the air, a war for territory. Possession.

Each deciding, in circling each other with words, who is owned and who owns.

“I did not give you up from dismay, I gave you up because you had become something outside of my control,” hisses Hannibal. Will grasps his hair, forces back his head and bares his neck, bends it enough that he can see the man swallow hard. “I should have let you burn.”

For a moment, both are still, entirely, any one move from either would render the other incapacitated or dead, and neither are ready for the conversation to be over. Will licks his lips, hair in his eyes, and considers the words, before a laugh pulls from him, youthful and breathless.

“Control,” he repeats, arching up against the man where he presses to him. “Do you have control now? You, who come home and check every room for me. Who carries a knife to the parking lot of the FBI and presses into corners. This, Hannibal, is what it is to be controlled. You would not wish it on yourself, why wish it on me when you created me in your image?”

Another laugh, Will’s legs wrapping around Hannibal and holding him tightly closer, still tilting his head back, still pressing the blade to his skin enough to leave a mark but not yet blood.

“And me?” he adds, soft. “I am out of control. Beyond it. And it is thrilling.” Will’s eyes are bright, his cheeks pink with the adrenaline and arousal both as he lies beneath the man he has ached for, begged for, needed, for months. He parts his lips, directs his eyes down to where Hannibal’s own are drawn in a snarl. “Join me there,” he sighs. “Let go.”

Hannibal’s laugh is as cruel as Will’s is bright, a dry and mirthless thing that rattles from him uncontrolled. “The one thing you cannot take from me is myself,” he murmurs, assured of this if nothing else - and indeed, there is nothing else that truly remains untouched by Will’s madness. “You would take my life from me. My freedom. All that I have managed to sustain - unchanged, myself, by my own acts as you have not been by yours - you would take from me but -”

The words catch in his throat, and Will’s eyes widen, however slightly, and Hannibal knows that he has nothing more to say.

Has nothing left to say or to defend.

His own mind, his bastion, his fortress, laid siege to and finally breached. He cannot make himself sleep, he cannot stop the quickening of his pulse in even imagining Will’s presence near him. Dragged, by the ferocity of Will’s anger and monstrosity, against his wishes into the coldest, blackest rooms of his mind, where the snow drives bitter against him and there is no light.

“Is this it, then?” Hannibal asks, impassive to the gentle squirming beneath him, unfeeling of the knife that breaks apart the fine fibers his shirt beneath its blade. “Your dogs. Your friends. Your work and your therapy,” he breathes, words sticking in his throat. “All rejected, to spite me -”

“- as you have rejected me,” sighs Will, eyes closing as the words sink into him.

A lucid clarity settles over Hannibal, who moves the knife slowly aside with the back of his hand, so that he can lay heavy against Will and breathe him in again, allow the familiar curls to graze his cheek.

“I will have you, Will. I will have you because to not have you is madness. I took your mind from you and so you took yourself from me but let me restore it,” he pleads softly.

Will tilts his head back, allows the closeness. Settles his feet gently against the insides of Hannibal’s calves to twine them together closer, to open himself to Hannibal, to slowly open the man to himself in turn.

_I will have you._

It is but more control, another demand and proclamation and Will knows that Hannibal has no idea that he is doing it, that to him, this is what relationships are, that to him, this is what affection and devotion and love is. Will knows, too, that he has missed this. Missed him. Missed _them_. That the pills from the bottles littering the floor of his house, empty, have done nothing to help him sleep, nothing to help him breathe or calm a panic.

Nothing.

And in one moment, this man pressing against him and warming his skin, has soothed Will’s heart to a slower beat again.

“What if it’s no longer there?” he asks softly, and for a moment he is genuinely worried that perhaps it is gone, his mind, his _self_ , that perhaps his waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, reliving murders after which he had emptied his stomach in the woods, tears dripping down his face, that that was all loss of time, and madness, and fever that he no longer felt.

The core of the fear that has plagued them both, regardless of whether it manifested in anger or hurt, in longing or in dread - that what was done irreparably charred the landscape of Will’s mind, in ways known and yet unseen. That Will himself has been driven to this monstrosity not by fate and circumstance but by compulsions unleashed that can never be reined back again.

Hannibal’s arm tucks beneath Will’s body, and he pushes himself up from the floor to sit instead, his back against the chair, and Will spread across his lap once more. He curls his legs alongside Hannibal’s hips, arms looping over his shoulders, and cheek turned against Hannibal’s own as the older man kisses the curve of his throat. Spreading his hands up Will’s back, to ease away the quiet terror in which both have spent far too long.

“Then I will find it for you,” Hannibal finally tells him. “Together we will seek out what stretches of the forest have not restored themselves, from the memories we share of them, and where I once attempted to destroy, Will,” he breathes his name as an oath, a vow. “I will rebuild. Regrow. I will bring you life again.”

Will sighs, the breath pushed from him by the gentle hands and warm words, by the reminder of how good it was when they had nothing between them but the sheets, and even then rarely. By the memory of the flickering light, electricity sparking over and over as Will had felt his entire being fall into a numb pit of sedation and empty, empty words.

A man so lost in his own belief that he cannot see beyond that.

He cannot see that Will’s smiles were filled with pain. Cannot see that the amount of concentration it took, the amount of effort, to drag the bodies and harm them, to seek them out and choose them, to lure them. He cannot see the way Will’s entire being has suffered for this, for him, or perhaps for himself.

Perhaps they are both obsessed, each with the other.

Perhaps Will has blinded himself to Hannibal’s ache, and his fears and genuine concern.

Perhaps both no longer exist.

He pulls back enough to cup Hannibal’s face in his hand, palm clammy and warm as he parts his lips and feels Hannibal’s tongue against his own. Will kisses him like it’s the end of the world, pressing close and pushing his heart to match the one beneath him. He kisses Hannibal until his head spins and he needs to breathe.

Forehead to forehead, neither open their eyes, but neither need to. A trust there, an understanding. A gentle and easy belief that perhaps Hannibal will fix him, rebuild, regrow, that he will bring him to life again, that the knife Will holds tight in his hand, raised and turned to hover just behind Hannibal’s neck won’t suddenly -

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "It's called a change over, the movie goes on and nobody in the audience has any idea."  
> \- Fight Club, David Fincher.


End file.
